A better title would have been: how to make the universe do (a whole lot of) math for us [1]. What so-called neural networks do should not be confused with thinking, at least not yet.
And the fact that we can get the universe to do math for us should not be surprising: we can model the universe with math, so of course that mapping works in the other direction as well. And this is not news. There were analog computers long before there were digital ones.
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[1] ... using surprisingly small amounts of hardware relative to what a digital computer would require for certain kinds of computations that turn out to be kind of interesting and useful in specific domains. But that's not nearly as catchy as the original.
And the fact that we can get the universe to do math for us should not be surprising: we can model the universe with math, so of course that mapping works in the other direction as well. And this is not news. There were analog computers long before there were digital ones.
---
[1] ... using surprisingly small amounts of hardware relative to what a digital computer would require for certain kinds of computations that turn out to be kind of interesting and useful in specific domains. But that's not nearly as catchy as the original.