Right, reading the title, I was assuming the material or machine itself trained nodes based on the stresses or shears it felt itself, but it being computer cont

Right, reading the title, I was assuming the material or machine itself trained nodes based on the stresses or shears it felt itself, but it being computer controlled doesn't really seem to mean it is a "mechanical neural network" in the sense that it "learns." I mean, you could say (from my field) a deformable mirror is a "mechanical neural network" that existed decades before NN became a hot topic.