  Over the course of the past few decades, the field of computational chemistry
has managed to manifest itself as a key complement to more traditional
lab-oriented chemistry. This is particularly true in the wake of the recent
renaissance of full configuration interaction (FCI)-level methodologies, albeit
only if these can prove themselves sufficiently robust and versatile to be
routinely applied to a variety of chemical problems of interest. In the present
series of works, performance and feature enhancements of one such avenue
towards FCI-level results for medium to large one-electron basis sets, the
recently introduced many-body expanded full configuration interaction (MBE-FCI)
formalism [J. Phys. Chem. Lett., 8, 4633 (2017)], will be presented.
Specifically, in this opening part of the series, the capabilities of the
MBE-FCI method in producing near-exact ground state energies for weakly
correlated molecules of any spin multiplicity will be demonstrated.
