[rauhallinen]

There's some work on using ML methods to map from the structure of a molecule to an odor. Interesting to see where it goes, current results aren't that mind blowing:

1. B. Sanchez-Lengeling, J. N. Wei, B. K. Lee, R. C. Gerkin, A. Aspuru-Guzik, A. B. Wiltschko, Machine Learning for Scent: Learning Generalizable Perceptual Representations of Small Molecules. arXiv [stat.ML] (2019), (available at http://arxiv.org/abs/1910.10685).

2. J. Kowalewski, B. Huynh, A. Ray, A System-Wide Understanding of the Human Olfactory Percept Chemical Space. Chem. Senses. 46 (2021), doi:10.1093/chemse/bjab007.

3. L. Shang, C. Liu, F. Tang, B. Chen, L. Liu, K. Hayashi, Odorant molecular feature mining by diverse deep neural networks for prediction of odor perception categories. bioRxiv (2022), , doi:10.1101/2022.04.20.488977.

[revolvingocelot]

I suspect that might be harder than it sounds. See this (circa 2014) Aussie chemistry teacher's crowdsourced organic compound perceived-smell infographic -- it seems pretty random.

[0] https://jameskennedymonash.wordpress.com/2014/01/04/table-of...

[shagie]

My favorite part of the vibration theory... from the Wikipedia article:

> Carvone presented a perplexing situation to vibration theory. Carvone has two isomers, which have identical vibrations, yet one smells like mint and the other like caraway (for which the compound is named).

> An experiment by Turin filmed by the 1995 BBC Horizon documentary "A Code in the Nose" consisted of mixing the mint isomer with butanone, on the theory that the shape of the G-protein-coupled receptor prevented the carbonyl group in the mint isomer from being detected by the "biological spectroscope". The experiment succeeded with the trained perfumers used as subjects, who perceived that a mixture of 60% butanone and 40% mint carvone smelled like caraway.