I was blown away when I read that article yesterday. This is by far the most advanced work I have seen done in this area, if indeed the quasi-brain did everything the article claims it did. It seems to me it amy be just a tad overblown, and they didn’t mention how long the brain lived? But they seemingly did achieve a successful biological computer with hardware/wetware integration.
All must now bow before our new rat-brained (mutine?) Borg overlords.
Simple: You are a blob of goo. But you are a lot more complex than 25,000 neurons spread out over a set of electrodes.
What they did was use neurons in a self-organizing pattern to perform a bunch of processing in a feedback loop. That is, the neurons arranged themselves in the best pattern to keep the outside in a steady state, which seems to be a strong tropsim for neurons in general.
The slashdot story about this dates to October 23. Y’all are a little slow on the trigger.