From what I see, it's like mimicking the annealing process and the "derivative" automatically drives you to the solution. If that's the case, implementing such hardware should be not that hard except for the programmable coupling part. A bit off-topic, this reminds me of the duality between any deep forward network and a modern Hopfield network with some special energy functions, in which the duality is based on the fact that the forward running process can be seen as an energy minimization process.
The relationship with Hopfield networks sounds fascinating, would love to discuss further. As you mentioned, there is a connection to annealing in that we are encoding the solution to our problem in the minimization of a physical system's energy. Indeed, the all-to-all coupling is the hard part!
