This seems like classic state estimation & process control duo. We are rediscovering things that other fields are applying for decades.

I was doing something similar with fluid equations on meshes more than ten years ago. Once you have Automatic Differentiation it's fairly straightforward to reformulate a time evolution process into one that solves for some free parameter.

It's a pity they don't give a video of the butterfly battle, that sounds a lot more impressive than the static 2d lizard.

What I'd love to see is a reproduction of the kind of embryo development videos you can get from lightsheet microscopy, e.g. https://youtube.com/watch?v=2Vnyph3Vmic

https://webcyte.io has a custom implementation of some of these algorithms - allows you to study the code and hack on it, while running everything in the browser… it’s my personal project, work-in-progress, but may be useful for people who learn from code, like myself.

Well this will support more of that simulation theory supporters, similar to James Gates claims that you can find computer code in the equations that we use to describe our universe in string theory.