Constructive Enumeration of Chiral Isomers of Alkanes*

The problem of exhaustive and non-redundant generation of formulas of chiral isomers of al-kanes was considered. The procedure starts with the generation of optimal codes of all N-alkane structures (N denotes the number of carbon atoms.) and then the algorithm deter-mines whether a given structure contains at least a single carbon atom, with four different sub-stituents. In order to accomplish these tasks, two simple rules have been used to delete redun-dant structures and determine whether two (alkyl) branches are identical or not. Key words chiral isomers of alkanes generation of structural formulas codes of Morgan trees canonical numbering * Dedicated to Professor Nenad Trinajsti} on the occasion of his 65th birthday