New findings by Google could save hundreds, if not thousands, of working hours for every new generation of technological chips.
Google’s Brain Team researchers attempted to find if artificial intelligence is better at designing technological chips than human experts. The findings of this research were interesting. A well trained A.I. is able to develop microchips for computers with great results. It is so great that Google will include microchips created through this experiment in its future generation of A.I. computer systems. Artificial Intelligence can very easily beat a human while playing games. Some might say that A.I. cannot think as a human but it has proved to be very useful when it came to creating microchips, the solutions it gave were out of the box.
A microchip is designed with a long process called ‘floor planning’. In this process human experts work with certain computer tools. The aim is to find the optimum arrangement for all subsystems on a chip so that it achieve the best performance. To design floor plans, months of intense effort are need for a whole team, acknowledges Google. However, Google Research’s Brain Team in California, seems to have cracked this code, which will make the whole process easier. A.I. was trained to find the most effective chip design by playing a game. The team used a data set of 10,000 floor plans to define the good and bad floor design using a learning reinforcement algorithm. Metrics such as wire length, power consumption, chip size and more were included.
The more the A.I. was able to distinguish the best chip configurations, the more it could produce its own chip configuration. It found certain unique approaches in terms of part placement. This was an inspiration for the experts to try new things, for example, by putting the components into doughnut form, to reduce their distance. In under six hours, A.I. now replicates what a team of experts took several months. The resulting floor plans are of the same or in some cases superior quality as the floor plans produced by humans.
