Communications of the ACM

Anonymous

Let's start by fully reverse enegnier tiny brains with circa 100'000 neurons but brains nevertheless capable of amazing feats (e.g. bees who solve everyday on the fly' an equivalent of the salesman travelling problem, i.e. the optimized order of flowers visitation to spare their tiny resources). Think of it that way, the humble bees seemingly suggesting that actually P = NP !By the way, the true power and capability of a single neuron is grossly underestimated IMHO, and so is the implicit computational power of chemical pathways among neurons (neurotransmitters). It's even possible that some form of quantum computation is harnessed at some infra level of neural activity, unravelling incredible hidden powers.Remember, for ancient enegniers, the brain was like a complex set of connected clepsydra, then cogs, then an electrical switchboard and now most proponents of strong AI are still thinking the wetware would be in principle reducible (emulated) in purely electrical neural nets . But each age is revealling a new order of complexity with implicit computations performed herein. The current view, even Kurzweil's one, is very probably still way too much simplist.I'm still longing for a functionalist computational equivalent of a fly brain. Let's do it before attacking the bigger version we are endowed with!Unfortunately, we are still very very far from understanding the true capability of a bee brain.At the root of evil, again and again, hubris and over confidence in the possible achievements of a too reductionist epistemology