In today’s edition, I drew attention to Liam Shaw’s nice piece about drug discovery by machine-learning, which contained the following sentence:
“It’s hard to estimate, but even if you restrict yourself to a handful of elements (carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, sulphur) there are at least 10^60 possible molecules that fit these criteria.”
The software I use to draft posts seems to have stumbled on the caret ‘^’ symbol and decided that the number must be 1060, which of course completely undermines the point that Liam was trying to make.
I should have spotted this when proof-reading the edition, but didn’t.
Accordingly, I am now dining on humble pie, which is a regular part of my diet.
And thanks to the many alert readers who spotted the error.
John