Progress Report For Year 2 Of The Research Grant On Ai And Design: Computer Aided Productivity (cap) And Plan For Year 3

ing and decomposing transformations are then applied in order to make the filters and evaluators easier to compute. An abstracting transformation replaces the original CSP problem space with a smaller abstraction space. A decomposing transformation splits a single CSP problem space into two or more subspaces, ignoring any interactions between them. Both types of transformation potentially introduce errors into the initially exact filters and evaluators. The transformations thus implement a tradeoff between the cost of using filters and evaluators, and the accuracy of the heuristic advice they provide. These techniques have been shown capable of synthesizing useful heuristics in domains such as floor- 11 planning and job-scheduling, among others. Ongoing research is aimed at applying and extending these techniques to a VLSI design task: Automatic synthesis of functions that estimate low level resource usage given only an abstract, high level circuit design. This research is part of co..