strandbeest evolution

>> “give me a big enough computer and the relevant initial conditions, and I’ll simulate the brain atom-by-atom.” Nuh-huh. You can't keep blaming it all on the hardware. Every year there's bigger and bigger computers and more and more people who claim they'll do better next year, when there's bigger computers. Well, it just ain't gonna happen. Fascinating intelligence that eats our most powerful artificial one for breakfast is all around us, and it runs on as little as five ganglia. Look at insects. They don't even have brains. They may not know calculus, they may be completely incapable of even acquiring the concept of a mathematical operation, but they are autonomous and viable in a harsh, hostile world that the most powerful machines we've built are completely incapable of inhabiting. If recreating insect-level intelligence artificially was just a matter of computing power, we 'd have done it already: we got more than enough of it. Five ganglia? My calculator is more powerful than that! But we don't have a single machine that can do what the lowliest fruit fly can do: survive on its own, and thrive, in the real world [1]. So- why is human-level intelligence just a matter of more computing power, but insect-level one is not? Is there some kind of secret ingredient? Is there some kind of magic involved? Will some sort of -gasp- singularity occur when the number of gates on a processor reaches a critical mass? Will the machine suddenly acquire a S.O.U.L. [2] when we stuff eno