Well, cellular automata are grid-based, so maybe something that makes use of that spatial aspect? The only thing I can think of right now is Chuck Moore's green

Well, cellular automata are grid-based, so maybe something that makes use of that spatial aspect? The only thing I can think of right now is Chuck Moore's greenarrays, which is a grid of dedicated Forth chips wired together: > Chuck Moore discusses what it takes to program a 144-core asynchronous chip that consumes only 7 pJ/inst, the idle cores taking just 100 nW while the active ones need 4mW running at 666 Mips: tight coding to minimize the number of instructions executed, reducing instruction fetches, transistor switching, and duty cycle. https://www.infoq.com/presentations/power-144-chip https://www.infoq.com/presentations/power-144-chip I don't think that in itself is a good fit, but maybe a good starting point to think about it alternative approaches? As an aside, what you're saying about it being easier to build anything we understand well applies even more when working in groups, since it's a lot harder to find a solution to a problem without a shared baseline. So it makes a lot of sense that this approach was taken here.