Multiagent Consensus Equilibrium in Molecular Structure Determination

Multiagent consensus equilibrium (MACE) is demonstrated for the integration of experimental observables as constraints in molecular structure determination and for the systematic merging of multiple computational architectures. MACE is founded on simultaneously determining the equilibrium point between multiple experimental and/or computational agents; the returned state description (e.g., atomic coordinates for molecular structure) represents the intersection of each manifold and is not equivalent to the average optimum state for each agent. The moment of inertia, determined directly from microwave spectroscopy measurements, serves to illustrate the mechanism through which MACE evaluations merge experimental and quantum chemical modeling. MACE results reported combine gradient descent optimization of each ab initio agent with an agent that predicts the chemical structure based on root-mean-square deviation of the predicted inertia tensor with experimentally measured moments of inertia. Successful model fusion for several small molecules was achieved as well as the larger molecule solketal. Fusing a model of moment of inertia, an underdetermined predictor of structure, with low cost computational methods yielded structure determination performance comparable to standard computational methods such as MP2/cc-pVTZ and greater agreement with experimental observables.