>Clearly these particular differential equations are highly robust to architectural changes.
Not really. There's an incredible amount of redundancy on the information received by the lens, because the exposure time needs to be short. The person writing the article purposefully didn't take pictures at higher apertures and different focus distances. Optics aren't modeled by differential equations, and if you want to model optics you need to choose a model that depends on your application. Modelling lens optics with quantum mechanics alone would be a massive pain in the ass, but completely ignoring them would also give you horribly wrong ideas. Also I don't really get by what you mean with "mimicking optics". Mimic which functions exactly?
Not really. There's an incredible amount of redundancy on the information received by the lens, because the exposure time needs to be short. The person writing the article purposefully didn't take pictures at higher apertures and different focus distances. Optics aren't modeled by differential equations, and if you want to model optics you need to choose a model that depends on your application. Modelling lens optics with quantum mechanics alone would be a massive pain in the ass, but completely ignoring them would also give you horribly wrong ideas. Also I don't really get by what you mean with "mimicking optics". Mimic which functions exactly?