Software can probably assist here, at least that is the assertion of the research group I am working in. Simulating the assembly of molecular machines is very

Software can probably assist here, at least that is the assertion of the research group I am working in. Simulating the assembly of molecular machines is very hard, more so than simulating the machines themselves. Chemical reactions are hard to simulate because we don't have a good way to model atoms, phenomenally large amounts of atoms are involved in chemical reactions, and chemical reactions take incredibly long amounts of time relative to what the individual atoms are doing. The last two make it so that events that are incredibly rare relative to individual atoms occur often enough in the real world to be of significant importance. Quantum computers might fix the first issue, the last two we'll need to get clever. And indeed we have some clever approaches for dealing with these two issues, but there is still work that needs to be done. Thinking in primitives isn't that useful. For years we have know that if we could daisy chain rotaxanes together we could make amazing artificial muscles. We get greater strains and relative forces than real muscles, but we have yet to realize such things. One can draw a structure with interlocking loops that could be daisy chained, but when we try to make in the real world, it ends up being huge(synthetically) and doesn't necessarily move in ways we thought it would.