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Re:Computer chemists win Nobel prize by blumkvist on Wednesday October 09, 2013 @07:13AM (#6520535)
There are programs which allow you to input desirable qualities (smell, color, density, /non/conductor, molecule mass, stereo orientation to name a few, very basic ones) and it will make computations and it will give you possible compounds.

Also software in chemistry can be used to simulate reactions and processes, which can take years to analyze with conventional methods(if at all possible), like folding protein chains.

Re:Computer chemists win Nobel prize by varelse on Wednesday October 09, 2013 @11:16AM (#6521726)
Actually, Vijay Pande's lab has been "folding" proteins in hours to days for years now by massively parallelizing the trajectories:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markov_chain_Monte_Carlo

Similarly, David Baker's lab has focused on producing the folded conformations of proteins in hours to days using simplified models that are designed for that task:

http://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/