This is a very old paper that, like a sibling comment indicated, served mainly to introduce the idea and show proof of concept. If you see my other top-level c

This is a very old paper that, like a sibling comment indicated, served mainly to introduce the idea and show proof of concept. If you see my other top-level comment, there are papers that have advanced this idea rather considerably since then. In particular one of the more promising recent implementations is "stochastic" superoptimization where you view it as a search problem instead of brute force search. One of the great things about this is the search doesn't need to be perfectly accurate: e.g., you can evaluate only the 10% most promising programs via benchmarks to determine how fast they are, using a much faster (but less accurate) method of counting instructions for the other 90%.