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by TheMode 521 days ago
Are you speaking about a sort of (multi-state) cellular automata?
1 comments

No, each cell has it's own 4x4 bit look up table (64 bits of "program" or "data" depending on the mode of that cell), so it's more like an FPGA with the routing fabric stripped out.
This sounds like just an fpga. What do you mean by “routing fabric stripped out?” How does data get from one cell to another?
Each cell only hooks to it's neighbors, up, down, left, right... so no "fast" wires across the chip, etc.
This really sounds like the Xilinx XC6200 series FPGA. It has a few routing hierarchies but does strip out most of the routing a classical (for that time) FPGA has. I heard numbers that 70% of a FPGA is routing.

The XC6200 became news once as they[1] used an evolutionary algorithm to create a configuration that can detect a single frequency tone. The resulting configuration was determined that it was impossible that it could work, but it did. Placing the configuration in a different part of the FPGA broke it.

It seemed that algorithm used the analog properties of the FPGA in that specific location to get to a smaller result.

[1] https://www.idi.ntnu.no/emner/tdt22/2011/Thompsonieeeehw.pdf

This sounds like the Systolic Array (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systolic_array) design google based its TensorFlow Processing Units on.
If data only travels into local neighbors this is really a multi state cellular automata though
I thought cellular automata all had to have the same rule/program across the grid? Like "Life" or the ones Wolfram is exploring.