I mean, woah. Hard to decide if these scientists created a chaotic system and are simply drawing the conclusion that "our system of silver nanowires is chaotic and the brain works kinda chaotically, so, this is a proto-brain" or truly "we spawned a chaotic system that self-organizes into meaningful, manipulable thought-like behaviors".

It seems that a similar experiment was used to implement a ML algorithm to predict traffic patterns--but they didn't provide enough detail for us to ascertain if those silver nanowires were more-or-less "a tiny, classical, programmable cpu built out of nanowires".

The biggest questions in my mind are:

1) How much can this system be manipulated/programmed to solve or "focus" on specific (or fuzzy) tasks?

2) What does the I/O look like for this? Can varied and non-trivial datasets be fed into the system? What does getting data out look like?

Super interesting if this all legit.