Replicating something exactly is a lot harder than making something that does the same thing in a different way. We can build planes that travel far faster than a bird could but that doesn’t mean it’s easy for us to exactly replicate how a bird flies, so I don’t think this says anything about how far away we are from a superintelligence
It's not only about exact simulation. And we actually do understand how birds can fly on a mechanical basis. This is not true for C.elegans' inner workings.
This. Submarines don't swim like fish, airplanes don't fly like birds and cars don't run like gepards.
Edit: I am surprised at the downvotes. In general, we learn from the nature, but aping it usually proved too difficult and often unpractical at the same time. Do we really want to replicate worm intelligence for practical purposes, or do we want something different?
I would say that a machine which can, say, analyze chemical compounds for their potential biological functions, is a very practical form of "intelligence" and yet very far from any biological intelligence that was ever produced in vivo. Worms cannot do that and even humans struggle with such tasks.
Yeah, but we understand why birds can fly and why fish can swim and how gepards can run, at least on a mechanical basis.
This is not true for how this 302 cell organism works. We don't know and struggle to understand. That's actually the reason why the project exists. To find out how everything works with an bottom-up approach.
While we may find shortcuts or even superior forms of intelligence without understanding how intelligence works in biological creatures, it is still curious how we struggle even with a "simple" organism like C.elegans.
No but we observably do know that that the connections between cells are important, to the point that by mimicking that we've derived significant benefit.
The Wright flyer didn't flap, and the wings only superficially look like anything a bird has.
> No but we observably do know that that the connections between cells are important, to the point that by mimicking that we've derived significant benefit.
That is true and it shows even more how important observabilty is for science and engineering. That's also why a simulation that actually provides an accurate enough model of reality might help us so much. The problem with AI right now is, that we try or even claim to understand Unix by mimicking the functionality of transistors.
> The Wright flyer didn't flap, and the wings only superficially look like anything a bird has.
They tried to mimick bird wings when coming up with flight control mechanisms.
Not only, it's also because of the square/cube law making it impossible to have a 50 ton flyer that flies in the same manner as a 5 kg flyer, you can't simply scale things up.
