  Several recently proposed semi--automatic and fully--automatic
coarse--graining schemes for polymer simulations are discussed. All these
techniques derive effective potentials for multi--atom units or super--atoms
from atomistic simulations. These include techniques relying on single chain
simulations in vacuum and self--consistent optimizations from the melt like the
simplex method and the inverted Boltzmann method. The focus is on matching the
polymer structure on different scales. Several ways to obtain a time-scale for
dynamic mapping are discussed additionally. Finally, similarities to other
simulation areas where automatic optimization are applied as well are pointed
out.
