E. coli does a lot more things than what is described in the article, the article just gives an extremely simplified view of the cells intelligence. They react to all sorts of substances in reality and decides where to go based on all of those, not just a simple "go towards good place" behavior. It is cool that they mapped out how it behaves in a simple environment, but you can do the same thing with humans, if you put a human in a simple experiment you can create similarly simple rules for human behavior.
And even if you just look at the behavior described in the article that would still require quite a bit of components since you would need to accumulate signals and normalize them and then turn that to oscillating control signals. Computing via chemical processes like cells do makes the computations a lot simpler.
Um...I'm suspecting that you want to argue with someone whose worldview is rather unlike mine. And our notions of how many components are in a "good handful" may also differ rather widely. Thanks, OO.
> I'm suspecting that you want to argue with someone whose worldview is rather unlike mine.
Probably, but I can only respond to the words you write and not your internal thoughts. To me a handful is 10 or less, from fingers, but I guess a handful could also be hundreds like hundreds of rice grains which makes more sense but I haven't seen anyone use handful for more than 10.
Sure, a DC full of computers can fully simulate a sucrose molecule at a detailed level of description. You wouldn't need a DC- it could be done on a single machine. The real question is, why would you need to model things at the molecular level of detail if that detail is not necessary to recapitulate the behavior of a cell?
One thng I've learned from over a decade of simulating proteins and nucleic acids is that those methods, while mathematically interesting, don't provide useful data given the amount of resources they require. Instead, reduced models (effectively embeddings) and careful statistical methods are much, much more productive.
I'm not thinking of simulating the whole cell. And last I heard, a DC full of computers can't fully simulate one sucrose molecule.