Is this novel? I remember reading about this in the 1980s - it was called "connexionism" but was basically the same.
It's hilarious; like AI found a whole new crop of people, but ones that aren't serious enough to do the background reading.
Sure, this work hasn't sprung from the primordial academic goop without influence, but the authors of this paper embraced old ideas to get faster and sparser FPGA implentations of neural nets. We have something now that we didn't before.
The vague ideas were there, but parallel progress in other domains have brought us to the point where we're able to take principles, put them into practice, and learn from them.