Thou shalt have no other gods before the ANSI C standard 1527

Let's say you play a little touch football on weekend with your kids. Does that mean a professional football player will 1) take you seriously; 2) say things you understand; 3) even bother to talk to you?

Oh boy. This is such garbage.

I have been saying all along, as have others, that there is no argument from authority involved, but only knowledge from authorities.

Let's say you had a question about PCB place and route. For example, why one needs to invoke the router during placement to discover the optimum pin buttignement to connectors with free pins. Would you understand if I suggested a very quick Hightower pbutt followed by a time-limited Rubin pbutt? Would it make sense when I said that in this case you should avoid simulated annealing?

Now I could digress here and explain all of that to you, point you to references (e.g. Rubin's thesis (but study Lee's algorithm first, or his thesis will not make sense), Hightower's FIRST paper but not the second, fast spanning tree algorithms ...)

I left out ten or twenty other things you would need to be familiar with before we could carry on a meaningful discussion.

Then we could talk about the domain specific knowledge needed, such as what are, and why does one want, connectors with free-pins, and why some connectors cannot HAVE any free pins..

We would also have to discuss incremental layout rule checking, and how that might impact both place and route performance.

Once you have the required background knowledge in hand, we could then move on to discussing the details, and I could answer your question about place and route to your satisfaction.

Now if you were my mentee, I would in fact start with an hour or so of the above discussion, and *then* you would get the direct answer you wanted: "This is not a good place to use simulated annealing." I'd also give you copies of the papers involved, a copy of Rubin's thesis, and pointers to further lit. You could study those at home at your leisure, if you chose.

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... Hank