If so, does this qualify as “snake oil”? What do you mean? Snake oil requires exaggeration and deception. Fair?

If a paper / experiment is done with intellectual honesty, great! If it doesn’t make a big splash, fine.

The paper is more or less a dead end. If there is another name you want to call it, by all means.

/[01]{8,}/: I was hoping to have a conversation. This is why I asked questions. Any responses to them?

Looking up the thread, you can see the context. Many of us pushed back against vague claims that AlphaChip was "snake oil". Like good engineers, we split apart the problem into clearer concepts. The "snake oil" proponents did not offer compelling replies, did they? Instead, they retreated to irrelevant points that have no bearing on making sense of the "snake oil" claim.

Sometimes technical people forget to bring their "debugging" skills to bear on conversations. There is a metaphorical connection; good debuggers would disambiguate terms, decompose the problem, answer questions, find cruxes, synthesize, find clearer terms, generate alternative explanations, and so on.

MRS is this week, you can go and join the conversations with people at the metal level. Probably even talk to the authors themselves!

I think the paper was probably done honestly, but also very poorly. They claimed synthesis of 36 new materials. When reviewed, for 24/36 "the predicted structure has ordered cations but there is no evidence for order, and a known, disordered version of the compound exists". In fact, with other errors, 36/36 claims were doubtful. This reflects badly for authors and worse for peer review process of Nature.

https://x.com/Robert_Palgrave/status/1744383962913394758

>worse for peer review process of Nature.

Every scientist will tell you that "peer reviewed" is not a mark of quality, correctness, impact, value, accuracy, whatever.

Scientists care about replication. More correctly, they care that your work can be built upon. THAT is evidence of good science.