According to Formal
−
Logical Approach
to Organic
Reactions, the systematical search for new,
unprecedented
types of chemical interconversions needs the complete sets of
symbolic, reaction, structural,
and
skeletal
equations to be generated. In this paper, the generation problems
are shown to be reduced to graph labeling
problems and, more precisely, to constructive enumeration problems for
orbit representatives of induced
permutation groups acting on certain sets of vertex or edge labelings
of well-defined graphs. The suggested
combinatorial models make it possible to take into account formal
charges and unshared electrons (needed
to describe ionic, radical, and oxidation−reduction processes) and
unchanged
bonds
forming
cycles (included
in cyclic structures of educts and products and needed to describe,
e.g., degenerate rearrangements). The
basic ideas of the effective generating algorithms, some results of the
corresponding analytical enumeration
techniques, and several new reaction types found by computer programs
are also discussed.