I love this, I have a friend who has a 3d printer and we started looking at the repo for this project to print the mechanical shift register and play with a physical toy representation of storing a bit of data: https://github.com/mattmoses/MechanicalComputingSystems
Edit: I love that other people are thinking about this around now
I think a skill here is learning a bias for experimentation and accepting the results one finds. Also the book "Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned" showcases the kind of open ended play that results in people discovering stuff like this.
The reasoning steps look reasonable and the interface is simple and beautiful, though Deepthought-8b fails to disambiguate the term "the ruliad" as the technical concept from Wolfram physics, from this company's name Ruliad. Maybe that isn't in the training data, because it misunderstood the problem when asked "what is the simplest rule of the ruliad?" and went on to reason about the company's core principles. Cool release, waiting for the next update.
Edit: I love that other people are thinking about this around now