Quilter, which has raised more than $40 million from investors including Benchmark, Index Ventures, and Coatue, used its physics-driven AI to automate the design of a two-board computer system that booted successfully on its first attempt, requiring no costly revisions. The project, internally dubbed “Project Speedrun,” required just 38.5 hours of human labor compared to the 428 hours that professional PCB designers quoted for the same task.
I seem to remember a story about how something - a neural net, or an early reinforced learning experiment - ended up accidentally exploiting a physics bug in a chip to achieve a result that should have gone through the chip’s expected circuitry instead.
It was specific to that one particular chip, and swapping it out for another supposedly identical chip caused the calculation, or simulation, or whatever that was running on the larger system, to fail.
That is, it wasn’t supposed to be exploiting physics glitches but that’s what happened.
… I think I found it. It happened all the way back in the 1990s if this story is to be believed: https://www.damninteresting.com/on-the-origin-of-circuits/
Yes! Thank you for the link! I can’t guarantee it but this seems like the exact thing we had been chatting about. The age puts it in time to have made the rounds but still be tech relevant at around the time of discussion.