I think routing is basically an image transformer problem without a good dataset right now. If the eye of the giant AI companies turned to autorouting and large synthetic but physically simulated circuit datasets were created, we would basically be done and autorouting would be a solved problem.
This means that all the work I’m doing now on heuristic algorithms, as well as all the hard work done by humans, will probably not be needed in the future. I just don’t see autorouting as being more difficult (in terms of solution space size) than the art being produced by transformer models right now.
I’m saying this because you’re right, these heuristic algorithms can only get us so far- the problem is really difficult. But our human intuition, the magic black box operation we do, doesn’t seem to be too far beyond the emerging transformer image models.
