I don't disagree with you on the potential financial burdens faced by PhD students but, in this case, and if I haven't missed anything, the infrastructural barrier is not high:
> All experi-ments use a single thread on a Macbook Pro with a 2.6GHz Intel Core i7-4960HQ processor. Unless stated otherwise, all timing results use five trials, with each trial reporting the fastest among 20 executions.
It may also be worth nothing that, even as a hobby, one can actually do a lot with modern hardware if you scope your project well. There is also a lot of free resources such as CoLab available to those who have very limited computing power at home/work.
Last but not least, there is also nothing stopping you from announcing your results on arXiv and, if you can be bothered (as a hobbyist), get it published in a peer-reviewed journal.
So if you still have ideas, I encourage you to go ahead and try them! :)
> All experi-ments use a single thread on a Macbook Pro with a 2.6GHz Intel Core i7-4960HQ processor. Unless stated otherwise, all timing results use five trials, with each trial reporting the fastest among 20 executions.
It may also be worth nothing that, even as a hobby, one can actually do a lot with modern hardware if you scope your project well. There is also a lot of free resources such as CoLab available to those who have very limited computing power at home/work.
Last but not least, there is also nothing stopping you from announcing your results on arXiv and, if you can be bothered (as a hobbyist), get it published in a peer-reviewed journal.
So if you still have ideas, I encourage you to go ahead and try them! :)