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.

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.