In 1993, after reading George Gilder's call to waste transistors[1], I came up with the insane idea of just making a fabric of 4x4 bit lookup tables, with each table taking a bit from each neighbor, and generating a bit to send as well. It was the minimum configuration that I thought would be suitable for general purpose computation.

There turn out to be several advantages that help balance out the colossal waste of power and transistors that may eventually make it worth pursuing. The latest is that the structure is so simple there isn't anywhere to hide code that doesn't belong in the chip, so it might be useful to national security types.

[1] - https://www.wired.com/1993/04/gilder-4/

Why did it die? I didn't believe enough to pursue getting the thing made.

What did I learn? Ideas are cheap, implemented ideas are gold.