Recursively apply patterns for pathfinding

I've been begrudgingly working on autorouters for 2 years, looking for new techniques or modern methods that might allow AI to create circuit boards.

One of the biggest problems in my view for training an AI to do autorouting is the traditional grid-based representation of autorouting problems which challenges spatial understanding. But we know that vision models are very good at classifying, so I wondered if we could train a model to output a path as a classification. But then how do you represent the path? This lead me down the track of trying to build an autorouter that represented paths as a bunch of patterns.

More details: https://blog.autorouting.com/p/the-recursive-pattern-pathfin...