Synthesizing a predatory search strategy for VLSI layouts

  • Authors:
  • A. Linhares

  • Affiliations:
  • Nat. Space Res. Inst., Brazilian Minist. of Sci. & Technol.

  • Venue:
  • IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation
  • Year:
  • 1999

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.00

Visualization

Abstract

When searching for prey, many predator species exhibit a remarkable behavior: after prey capture, the predators promptly engage in “area-restricted search”, probing for consecutive captures nearby. Biologists have been surprised with the efficiency and adaptability of this search strategy to a great number of habitats and prey distributions. We propose to synthesize a similar search strategy for the massively multimodal problems of combinatorial optimization. The predatory search strategy restricts the search to a small area after each new improving solution is found. Subsequent improvements are often found during area-restricted search. Results of this approach to gate matrix layout, an important problem arising in very large scale integrated (VLSI) architectures, are presented. Compared to established methods over a set of benchmark circuits, predatory search is able to either match or outperform the best-known layouts. Additional remarks address the relation of predatory search to the “big-valley” hypothesis and to the field of artificial life