It is a really fun idea to build a boids router (shelving that for a future article!) I wrote previously about recursive pattern autorouters which are really good at having small solution spaces (and therefore, easier to get conventional machine learning algorithms to predict). There are so many interesting unexplored areas in autorouting!!

I hadn't heard of jumpflooding (for others: fast, parallel algorithm for approximating distance fields), that could definitely be interesting, thanks for the tip!