Three scientists won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry yesterday for devising computer models to simulate chemical processes, providing a revolutionary tool for drug designers and engineers.

Martin Karplus, a US-Austrian citizen, Michael Levitt, a US-British citizen, and Arieh Warshel of the US and Israel, were honoured “for the development of multiscale models for complex chemical systems," the Nobel jury said.

The three were being honoured for "taking the experiment to cyberspace," it added.

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Chemists all over the world simulate complex experiments on their computers thanks to work by the three that dates back to the 1970s, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said in a statement.

The tool is "universal", helping pharmaceutical engineers to design new

drugs or engineers to make cleaner energy sources or smarter manufactured products.

The three combined classical physics with quantum physics in computer models designed to predict chemical reactions.

Such reactions can take place, for instance, between industrial chemicals or

when an enzyme cuts a molecule in a cell.

The processes can take place in a fraction of a millisecond, defeating conventional algorithms that try to map them step by step.

"The computer models that have been developed by the Nobel laureates in chemistry 2013 are powerful

tools," the academy observed.

Karplus, 83, works at the University of Strasbourg in eastern France and Harvard University; Levitt, 66, at Stanford University; and Warshel, 72, at the University of Southern California.

The trio will share the prize sum of eight million

Swedish kronor ($1.25 million, 925,000 euros), reduced because of the economic crisis last year from the 10 million kronor awarded since 2001.

Last year, the honour went to Robert Lefkowitz and Brian Kobilka of the US for identifying a class of cell receptor.