I'm sure you're quite right and the IEEE link makes oodles of sense, but for people examining notions of creativity in computational intelligence (for example),

I'm sure you're quite right and the IEEE link makes oodles of sense, but for people examining notions of creativity in computational intelligence (for example), the idea of these chips is quite attractive. In fact, I remember programming ANNs in horribly non-distributed C paradigms, and even PureData objects trying to come up with non-garbage computer music in the 90's and thinking we needed precisely the kind of chip they're trying to engineer. This, and the advent of HTMs and other non-ANN ways of going about it, mean that chips that handle distributed processing for applications that model human creativity (which is necessarily about concurrent time-based activities), are a -good- thing no matter what the degree of success, IMHO.