What they are trying to achieve is to demonstrate that the coupling approach works in a simulated physics environment (O(n^2) as you point out) so that they can then build CMOS circuits that create actual oscillators and then let the laws of physics do the computation. This is a very bold vision!

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ttul an hour ago | parent | next [-]

And anyone who has done an introductory course in VLSI design would know that capacitance (coupling) is something you usually want to get rid of. However, all kinds of amazing analog circuits have been developed over the decades that exploit coupling effects. So, their idea is not outlandish at all.

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WhitneyLand an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Which idea is not outlandish? Physical computing? I agree physical computing is a fascinating topic.

But specifically what they’ve simulated here? I don’t see how that would ever work in real life scaled up to any kind of real size.

I’m not criticizing them for starting out small. Lots of things can be proven with small models. I’m saying in principle, I don’t see how this will work unless there’s some fundamentally new technique that is currently not known about. Maybe they have some secret idea but they haven’t shown it here.

	▲	fc417fc802 an hour ago \| parent [-]
		At 5k to 10k nodes aren't they in the ballpark of a single layer from a scaled up conventional model? Rather than scaling further presumably you could stack these. However for a physical implementation ~100M interconnects seems questionable to me (but I know next to nothing about hardware engineering TBF) so I wonder if they intend to move to a partially connected model similar to the gyroscopic model of computation that the article links to.

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fc417fc802 an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

But wouldn't capacitance as it naturally occurs be only to immediate neighbors? Not n^2 as in their model.

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fluoridation an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Doesn't that require quadratically-many wires to connect all the processing units?