>> It's one of those thankless enterprises like OpenWorm, which is trying to get a simulation of the simplest known organism with a nervous system, a nematode w

>> It's one of those thankless enterprises like OpenWorm, which is trying to get a simulation of the simplest known organism with a nervous system, a nematode with 959 cells. After over 20 years, it still doesn't work very well. Yet someone has to do that kind of ground work. I was considering a research project like that, on insect intelligence (I like bugs) (and bugs like me) but I was discouraged from it, the discouraging agent noting the extreme inter-disciplinary nature of such research. That's another roadblock I guess. Another form of this is that modern AI researchers tend to be completely clueless about cognitive science, psychology, and anything that has remotely to do with animal intelligence, other than computational neuroscience of the connectionist kind. People are trying to figure out how to make computers exhibit intelligent behaviour like that of animals, without having any idea what animal intelligence even looks like. Of course that's going to stall. Then again I was in an AI workshop at the Royal Society in London recently, with many illustrious folks from all the big unis in the US and EU, and after a big discussion about the capabilities of large language models, the subject of trying to simulate animal intelligence came up and was discussed in some seriousness, I think.