Programming sheets of glass

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2208975-ai-made-from-a-sheet-of-glass-can-recognise-numbers-just-by-looking/

Training the AI involved presenting the glass with different images of handwritten numbers. If the light did not pass through the glass to focus on the correct spot, the team adjusted the size and locations of impurities slightly. After thousands of iterations, the glass “learned” to bend the light to the right place. The impurities basically act as “artificial neurons”, says Yu.

learning or engineering?

That is called optical computing. Currently it works only with such static problems.

Don't you just wish OP wasn't a lobste.rs bot?
What's wrong with citing the paper?
https://www.osapublishing.org/prj/abstract.cfm?uri=prj-7-8-823

We show optical waves passing through a nanophotonic medium can perform artificial neural computing. Complex information is encoded in the wavefront of an input light. The medium transforms the wavefront to realize sophisticated computing tasks such as image recognition. At the output, the optical energy is concentrated in well-defined locations, which, for example, can be interpreted as the identity of the object in the image. These computing media can be as small as tens of wavelengths and offer ultra-high computing density. They exploit subwavelength scatterers to realize complex input/output mapping beyond the capabilities of traditional nanophotonic devices.
© 2019 Chinese Laser Press

>>3 Just call it what it is, glorified punchcard.

>optical computing
So MoO2's "optronic computer" tech name might actually mean something more than "a computer that just uses fiber optics instead of wires--isn't that kind of dumb" like I always assumed? (Outside of the dumbness of sci-fi overuse of "-tronic" when the word is formed from "electron-ic" not "elec-tronic"...)

>>5
anusotronic

>>5
But can it make me a sandwich?

http://old.reddit.com/r/OpenAI/comments/cgcz3l/microsoft_to_invest_1_billion_in_openai/eug84ju

>>3
Can it compete with x86_64?

>>9
For toy problems - yes. For practical applications (beside basic data transmissions) - no.

Will it be fooled by a laser pointer?

>>11
optical computing is a cat

prescription optical filters?