GSoC idea - Simulated annealing to search for query plans

Dear Hackers,

I'm Grzegorz Parka, BSc Engineer of Technical Physics and student of
Computer Science at WUT, Poland. Last year I've been a bit into
evolutionary algorithms and during my research I found out about GEQO in
Postgres. I also found out that there are plans to try a different attempt
to find optimal query plans and thought it could be a good thing to use it
as a project for GSoC.

I'm interested in one of old TODO items related to the optimizer -
'Consider compressed annealing to search for query plans'. I believe this
would be potentially beneficial to Postgres to check if such a heuristic
could really choose better query plans than GEQO does. Judging by the
results that simulated annealing gives on the travelling salesman problem,
it looks like a simpler and potentially more effective way of combinatorial
optimization.

As deliverables of such a project I would provide a simple implementation
of basic simulated annealing optimizer and some form of quantitative
comparison with GEQO.

I see that this may be considerably bigger than most of GSoC projects, but
I would like to know your opinion. Do you think that this would be
beneficial enough to make a proper GSoC project? I would also like to know
if you have any additional ideas about this project.

Best regards,
Grzegorz Parka