Washington, July 29 (IANS) A new computer game prototype combines work and play to help solve a fundamental problem underlying many hardware design tasks. Called FunSAT, it could help integrated circuit designers select and arrange transistors and their connections on silicon microchips, among other applications.
Designing chip architecture for the best performance and smallest size is an exceedingly difficult task that’s outsourced to computers these days.

But computers simply flip through possible arrangements in their search. They lack the human capacities for intuition and visual pattern recognition that could yield a better or even optimal design. That’s where FunSAT comes in.

Developed by University of Michigan (U-M) computer science researchers Valeria Bertacco and Andrew DeOrio, FunSAT is designed to harness humans’ abilities to strategise, visualise and understand complex systems.

“Computer games can be more than a fun diversion,” said Bertacco, associate professor in computer science and engineering.

The board consists of rows and columns of green, red and grey bubbles in various sizes. Around the perimeter are buttons that players can turn yellow or blue with the click of a mouse.

The buttons’ colour determines the colour of bubbles on the board. The goal of the game is to use the perimeter buttons to toggle all the bubbles green.

The game actually unravels so-called ’satisfiability’ problems — classic and highly complicated mathematical questions that involve selecting the best arrangement of options.

In such quandaries, the solver must assign a set of variables to the right true or false categories so to fulfil all the constraints of the problem.

In the game, the bubbles represent constraints. They become green when they are satisfied. The perimeter buttons represent the variables. They are assigned to true or false when players click the mouse to make them yellow (true) or blue (false).

Once the puzzle is solved and all the bubbles are green, a computer scientist could simply look at the colour of each button to gather the solution of that particular problem, said an U-M release.

DeOrio will present a paper on the research on Thursday at the Design Automation Conference in San Francisco.