{"id":233580,"date":"2026-03-18T14:07:16","date_gmt":"2026-03-18T19:07:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/03\/inverse-design-a-new-pathway-to-custom-functional-polymers"},"modified":"2026-03-18T14:07:16","modified_gmt":"2026-03-18T19:07:16","slug":"inverse-design-a-new-pathway-to-custom-functional-polymers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/03\/inverse-design-a-new-pathway-to-custom-functional-polymers","title":{"rendered":"Inverse design: A new pathway to custom functional polymers"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/inverse-design-a-new-pathway-to-custom-functional-polymers.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>At a potluck, you ate the best chocolate chip cookie\u2014golden-brown, thick and chewy. Unfortunately, you don\u2019t know who made the cookie to get the recipe from, so you decide to recreate it. Using forward design principles, you might randomly choose a recipe from dozens of options, bake and observe the resulting cookies. If they are too thin, you might start over with a new recipe, add more flour or chill the dough longer and make a new batch. An alternative method is to start from the cookie characteristics you want and ask: What recipe and baking settings will produce that type of cookie? This method is called inverse design.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>At a potluck, you ate the best chocolate chip cookie\u2014golden-brown, thick and chewy. Unfortunately, you don\u2019t know who made the cookie to get the recipe from, so you decide to recreate it. Using forward design principles, you might randomly choose a recipe from dozens of options, bake and observe the resulting cookies. If they are [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":396,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1523],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-233580","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/233580","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/396"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=233580"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/233580\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=233580"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=233580"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=233580"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}