[sireat]

This was a very good read.

My naive question are the gates are always so trivial or are they usually black boxes with an unknown function underneath(instead of clearly defined ,+, etc).

In other words do we usually/always know what stands behind f(x,y)?

Otherwise, if f(x,y)=xy then obviously you can hardcode a heuretic that just cranks up max x and max y and gets max f(x,y).

That is the question is why should we tweak the input slightly not go all out.