The chemical blogosphere has started to have fun with Wolfram Alpha (http://wwmm.ch.cam.ac.uk/blogs/adams/?p=269 and links from it), so here’s my contribution. Is the following picture a (bad) lookup? Is this an attempt to parse the name? After all a single character “m” shouldn’t matter to the greatest brain ever.
(For non-chemists it’s got the structure of dibromoMethane instead of dibromoEthane).
I think we could bet on OPSIN beating WA in a contest.
Sort of an unfair competition – hopefully OPSIN (or some other name2structure program) would complain that “dibromoethane” is ambiguous – are you interested in 1,1-dibromoethane or 1,2-dibromoethane?
I tried locants and it didn’t have answers so I tried something more generic. I don’t mind it not having answers – just more worried when they are wrong.
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