The RFT Engine

A unified, first-principles physics engine for molecular discovery, built on geometry rather than fitted data.

What it is

The RFT engine is the computational core of the LatticeZero platform. It evaluates the physics of molecular interactions from first principles. The interaction terms and constants are derived from the geometry of a unified framework, instead of being learned from labeled examples or tuned to a force field.

Origin

The framework was originally developed to model physical systems across very different scales. To apply it to molecules, the same continuous geometric mathematics was transposed into the angstrom regime. The result is an engine that bypasses both explicit pairwise interaction summation and expensive quantum-mechanical approximations.

Two capabilities

High-throughput docking and screening

The engine places and ranks candidate molecules inside a protein pocket and scores them, running client-side on a GPU through WebGPU compute shaders. Internal benchmarks exceed 10,000 ligands per second on a single consumer card, with no server queue. The same calculation runs on a laptop or a recent phone.

Quantum-accurate interaction energies

The same engine computes intermolecular interaction energies that track gold-standard quantum chemistry, with zero fitted parameters and no training data. The method is described in How the RFT Engine Computes Molecular Physics.

Validation

Both capabilities are validated on standard public benchmarks against gold-standard references, with holdout cross-validation and null controls. A detailed summary is given in Validation Against Gold-Standard Quantum Chemistry.