*Boy that's plenty weird. Waveform meta-materials, no less.
https://phys.org/news/2018-12-wi-fi-analog-wave-based.html#jCp
A pair of researchers, one with the Langevin Institute, the other a company called Greenerwave, both in France, has developed a way to use ordinary Wi-Fi signals to perform analog, wave-based computations. In their paper published in the journal Physical Review X, Philipp del Hougne and Geoffroy Lerosey describe their experiments and what they represent.
(...) As hardware engineers begin to run headlong into the limitations of Moore's Law, some engineers have begun to take another look at analog processing.
Analog processors make use of the amplitude in waves found in electronic circuits or in light waves. And instead of brute force crunching, they rely on waveform shaping, which is done with metamaterials. Early work with such materials showed that such processors could be highly efficient at matrix processing. But efforts to use such materials have run into difficulties due to fabrication issues. In this new effort, del Hougne and Lerosey demonstrate that some analog processors can be created via a simpler approach.
In their experiments, the researchers created a box to simulate a home environment...
Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2018-12-wi-fi-analog-wave-based.html#jCp
