GENERATION AND ENUMERATION OF CARBON SKELETONS

Two different programs were written to enumerate all possible carbon skeletons, i.e., saturated hydrocarbons. These enumerations were carried out fully to 11 carbon atoms and for limited numbers of rings to 16 carbon atoms. The results of the two programs were consistent with each other as well as with such previous enumerations as were available. A program to show graphically the stored skeletons was also prepared. The skeletons of commercially available starting materials are a minute subset of the total. Various ways of classifying the data into subsets are illustrated as are superstructure searches from seed skeletons.