Alien Megastructures

...one step closer, according to an article in  nature.    The development they are reporting involves the use of reinforcement learning to dramatically increase the speed at which silicon chip floorplans can be designed, especially the floorplanss of Google's own Tensor Processing Units (TPU's). Since TPU's are themselves optimized for machine learning algorithms, this work represents a potentially important development in the field of artificial intelligence, since it could herald the beginning of what Roman Yampolskiy termed,  seed AI . This is the scenario where a human-created AI possesses engineering capabilities that surpass those of the very humans that created it, and would thus be able to continually improve its own design, leading to ever more advanced hardware.   A  CNBC  article covers the same story, while Yann LeCun, Facebook's chief AI scientist, described it as 'very nice work.'