Fig. 1: Schematic of SPIM.

A laser beam passes through an amplitude-modulating mask encoding the coupling matrix J of the Ising problem and then reflects on a binary-phase-modulating SLM, which encodes the current spin configuration. Intensity measurements of this resultant beam by a charged-coupled device (CCD) camera allow the Hamiltonian H of the current spin configuration to be calculated. Further experimental details can be found in refs. 15,24,25.