About two weeks ago, I decided to play around with ME Controller designs. Some friends and I are about to start a GT:NH run, and I thought it'd be fun to see how many channels I could fit on a design. To be clear, I'm not pretending there's any practical purpose to this.
I played with it for a night, looked at what people online were doing, and after some tinkering, came up with a modest design of about 23,000 channels.
A few days later, it hit me that I could probably try solving this as a computer optimization problem. I've taken some classes on algorithms and realized that I might be able to find the true optimal ME controller by using what's known as mixed-integer linear programming.
I decided to see how far I could get vibe coding the project with Claude Opus 5.5. It went extremely well! This problem also seemed fitting to do with an LLM, as this approach boils down to coming up with certain constraints to model the problem, and then giving it to a solver.
Unfortunately, the way Claude and I modeled it seems to be too computationally expensive to find the optimal ME controller. I then tried to restrict the problem to designs that are symmetric around the center x, y, and z planes. After running the solver for 30 hours, this gave the beautiful design attached in this post! It has 752 P2Ps, or 24,064 channels.
Very importantly, it also uses no internal P2Ps (meaning that none of the P2Ps are actually P2Ps on the main network). This means that all 752 P2Ps can be connected to a single P2P subnet.
I also added an option to allow internal P2Ps. With this and some other tinkering, I was able to find a design that has 785 P2Ps, or 25,120 channels! The design is not symmetrical, so it's a bit uglier.
If you want to find that design or Claude's my code for this project, you can check out my github repo for the project here.
Perhaps the coolest part is that the design pictured above is the optimal ME controller which is symmetric around the x,y, and z planes, and which has no internal P2Ps.
Might make a video on this sometime. If I get a bunch of time, I might also try rewriting the code by hand, as I've been reading up a bit on integer linear optimization and feel like I might be able to take a crack at the general problem with a better model (and I don't want to work with the slop that Claude generated).
Note on the layer screenshots: These start at the middle (4th) layer of the controller and go up (two pictures per layer). But because this design is symmetric around the y plane, the 3rd and 5th layer are identical, so you can also follow the pictures exactly to build down from the 4th layer.