The projections typically colour the columns much as we’d intuitively expect: for example, the noble gases appear almost identical to one another and distinct from all the others, the halogens tend to form a monochrome column, and the alkali metals too have a unity that is close in colour to that of the alkaline earth metals. Ceriotti and colleagues answer that question with an easily eyeballed, graduated colour-coding of elements in the conventional format of the table such that similarities are reflected in their hue. An obvious question is whether the proximity of elements in these projections matches the relationships found in the periodic table. In these representations, certain elements are found to cluster together in the low-dimensional space. Ceriotti’s team has used other datasets too, producing other representations of the elemental relationships. It’s a little like the old classical idea that the substances we see, such as iron or copper, are made up of the more fundamental ‘elements’ earth, air, fire and water, combined in different proportions. They then simplified these high-dimensional descriptions by mapping the elements onto a compressed, lower-dimensional space in which each element is characterised by values of a handful of abstract quantities. The exercise suggests that the periodic table has more dimensions than the page – based solely on the chemistry of the elements

The structures are represented as a vector of features that describe both the geometric relations between different atoms and their chemical identity. Michele Ceriotti at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne and his coworkers have applied ML to crystal structures drawn from a dataset 1 of around 11,000 quaternary compounds of the type ABC 2D 6, calculated for a wide range of compositions (incorporating 39 main-group elements) by density functional theory. These schemes can often identify connections invisible to humans, because we can’t generally process that much data and because the correlations may exist in high-dimensional spaces that we cannot visualise. For example, substances like water and copper sulfate are not in the periodic table because they are compounds.Colouring the elements to show the ‘character’ uncovered by the algorithm reveals similarities and exceptions within the periodic table Periodic_table v2.0īoth methods use machine learning (ML): the standard form of most artificial-intelligence algorithms at present, in which relationships and correlations between variables are deduced by combing through data. Only elements are found in the periodic table, never compounds. Most elements are metals, rather than non-metals.Įach element has its own chemical symbol, made from letters. Hydrogen is a non-metal but it is often put in the middle. The zig-zag line in this diagram separates the metals, on the left, from the non-metals, on the right.

there are only two elements in Period 1 (hydrogen and helium).

the block in between Group 2 and Group 3 is where the transition metals are placed.

the main groups are numbered from 1 to 7 going from left to right, and the last group on the right is Group 0.

the metals are on the left and the non-metals are on the right (hydrogen is a non-metal but is often put in the middle).

elements in the same group are similar to each other.All the different elements are arranged in a chart called the periodic table.

Series periodic table chemistry