Harnessing Human Computation Cycles for the FPGA Placement Problem

Harnessing human computation is an approach to find problem solutions. In this paper, we investigate harnessing this human computation for a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) placement problem. We create a game called Plummings. In this game, a player attempts to reduce the critical path of a digital design mapped to an FPGA by swapping clusters on the array, but the problem details are abstracted away, and instead, the game simply presents a challenging problem where paths must be minimised to save the game characters the Plummings. Once players have played a level, the placement is can be evaluated in VPR. Our results show that 4 human players over a set of 5 benchmarks can create placement solutions with comparable critical paths compared to VPR’s solutions. This is not always the case, and we suggest some reasons and further approaches to improving our results.