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.
There was a story about a researcher using evolving algorithms to build more efficient systems on FPGAs. One of the weird shortcuts was some system that normally used a clock circuit, but none was available, and it made a dead-end circuit the would give a electric pulse when used, giving it a makeshift clock circuit. The big problem was that better efficiency often used quirks of the specific board, and his next step was to start testing the results on multiple FPGAs and using the overall fitness to get past that quirk/shortcut.
Pretty sure this was before 2010. Found a possible link from 2001.