Simulated Annealing with Inaccurate Cost Functions

{ Establish whether errors are introduced by approximations in the cost function. For example, a common cost function approximates the length of wires in a rectilinear network as half the bounding-box perimeter. This inaccurate cost function appears in almost every VLSI circuit placement program. { Instrument inaccurate parallel programs to compute and display errors during a run. { Include algorithms to keep errors within a constant factor of the temperature. Use the results of x6 and x7 to help estimate the factor. { Increase the number of annealing steps performed at each temperature to compensate for errors. Use the results of x7.3 to help estimate the number of steps. { Weigh the performance beneets of parallelism or sloppy computations against the increased annealing steps to obtain the same quality. Inaccuracies can even degrade the total execution time, when considered in this light. Acknowledgements.