I understand and have read the article. Running 80 experiments with a crude form of simulated annealing is at most 0.0000000001% of the effort that has been spent on making that kind of hill climb work well by traditional EDA vendors. That is also an in-sample comparison, where I would believe the Google thing pre-trained on Google chips would do well, while it might have a harder time with a chip designed by a third party (further from its pre-training).
The modern versions of that hill climb also use some RL (placing and routing chips is sort of like a game), but not in the way Jeff Dean wants it to be done.
The modern versions of that hill climb also use some RL (placing and routing chips is sort of like a game), but not in the way Jeff Dean wants it to be done.