The optical lithography wit an ArF excimer laser as a light source is expected to be used in the mass production of giga-bit DRAMs which require less than 0.2.mu.m minimum feature size. In this case, the distortion of a patterned image becomes very severe, since the lithography porcess is performed at the resolution limit. Traditionally, the photomask pattern was designed and revised with trial-and-error methods, such as repeated execution of process simulators or actual process experiments which require time and effort. Ths paper describes a program which automatically finds an optimal mask pattern. The program divides the mask plane into cells with same sizes, chooses a cell randomly, changes the transparent/opaque property of the cell, and eventually genrates a mask pattern which produces required image pattern. The program was applied to real DRAM cell patterns to produce mask patterns which genertes image patterns closer to object images than original mask patterns.