It might be argued that the benefit of using the grammar in the above example could also be achieved by simply enumerating all possible compositions and filtering chargebalanced ones out after the fact. Indeed, this was the strategy used by Davies et al. in their paper 'Computational Screening of All Stoichiometric Inorganic Materials'. However, any such brute-force approach will eventually run into a combinatorical wall, with the number of quarternary compounds in that paper already exceeding 10 12 . This number would further explode if the multitude of possible crystal structures for each composition were taken into account. Meanwhile, using a generative grammar ensures that only more interesting compositions are produced in the first place.