I don't think they are even referring to gradient descent here. I think they are referring to systems like AlphaEvolve where they use LLMs to give an informed/heuristical guess to try to tackle an otherwise insurmountable search space.

“neuromorphic computer that combines quantum-tunnelling physics with a brain-inspired architecture to find solutions to hard mathematical problems”

I have Bruce Sterling’s Ascendaries: The Best of Bruce Sterling” and… the reality is somewhere here in his stories…

Or take Charles Stross and his Accelerando book.

Do you think that teams behind such projects are avid readers and just fulfill the sci-fi stories? :)

> General purpose commodity silicon with rapidly evolving software generally beats specialised hardware.

All of the Amiga people are sighing right now, as they recall how their beautiful, elegant system synergistically designed with custom chips was outpaced by CPU/memory brute force in the early 90s.

I'm not sure whether these FPGA codes count as specialized hardware.

In hardware Prolog/Kanren/expert systems? That would be possible with libre microcode for Intel, and not this spyware corporate shithole we are living it.

We would be able to switch microcode at boot and set one for security, another one for C performance, others for Lisp performance and so on.

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