No Moods, Ads or Cutesy Fucking Icons (Reloaded). Begin #content Begin #main Begin .post Most of you probably know about Turing machines : hypothetical gizmos built of paper punch-tape, read-write heads, and imagination, which can — step by laborious step — emulate the operation of any computer. And some of you may be old enough to remember the Sinclair ZX-80 — a sad little personal computer so primitive that it couldn't even run its video display and its keyboard at the same time (typing would cause the screen to go dark). Peer into the darkness between these artifacts, stir in a little DNA, and what do you get? This hairy little spider right here . A pinpoint brain with less than a million neurons, somehow capable of mammalian-level problem-solving. And just maybe, a whole new approach to cognition. This is an old story, and a popsci one, although I've only di...