Reinforcement learning (RL) for physical design of silicon chips in a Google
2021 Nature paper stirred controversy due to poorly documented claims that
raised eyebrows and attracted critical media coverage. The Nature paper
withheld most inputs needed to produce reported results and some critical steps
in the methodology. But two separate evaluations filled in the gaps and
demonstrated that Google RL lags behind human designers, behind a well-known
algorithm (Simulated Annealing), and also behind generally-available commercial
software. Crosschecked data indicate that the integrity of the Nature paper is
substantially undermined owing to errors in the conduct, analysis and
reporting.