Henry Rzepa muses on Mindless Chemistry

Chemist Henry Rzepa muses about a scholarly paper called "Mindless Chemistry" that appeared in The Journal of Physical Chemistry A Letters . He begins:

The (hopefully tongue-in-cheek) title Mindless chemistry was given to an article reporting an automated stochastic search procedure for locating all possible minima with a given composition using high-level quantum mechanical calculations. "Many new structures, often with nonintuitive geometries, were found". Well, another approach is to follow unexpected hunches. One such was described in [my] previous post, and here I follow it to one logical conclusion….