This may or may not be some seriously cool materials science, but parallelizing a cellular automaton is trivial (as cells change state based on local interactions) and has been done with conventional hardware already, as has the construction of systems that change their own wiring in response to experience.
It is false that "parallelizing a cellular automaton is trivial". I can't easily build my own, special-purpose hardware because Intel, AMD, and other such companies control the process, and that's mostly due to the expense of today's silicon foundries being unaffordable to hobbyists. Even if I use the latest FPGAs, such as the Virtex-7 (#1), I am still limited by the underlying technology choices made by Xilinx, as well as by the high cost and continued availability of these high-end parts. I realize that the OP is about some cool work that is merely at the R&D stage, but the bottom-line message is that this could lead to a technique whereby ordinary mortals, albeit ones with (potentially homemade) STMs, could create their own circuitry. It's a pretty big deal if this work results in me being able to build, with relative ease, a huge CA array, upon which I can then apply, through programming, a wide range of computational topologies.
"parallelizing a cellular automaton is trivial" != "build my own, special-purpose hardware"
You can parallelize a cellular automaton trivially with any form of parallel computation, from multiple cores, to a GPU, to an FGPA. Hence my skepticism that their application is particularly revolutionary or brain-relevant, as the article seems to imply.
As for FPGAs you can get them fairly cheaply if you aren't looking for a top of the line beast. [1] Given that you can emulate anything up to and including a Pentium on a sufficiently powerful FPGA, I fail to see how you are "limited by the manufacturers design choices" or why you can't "apply a wide range of computational topologies" on one.
In any event, the breathless tone of the article about "brain-like" computing and this somehow being a parallelism silver bullet are unwarranted.
