>Could it possibly work? This is one of those situations that really requires
>massive parallel processing.

This is not coincidential - a very deep, hard to overcome difference between 
evolution (in the broad sense of natural systems) and code is that evolution 
has many, many atoms *all* working in parallel *every microsecond*, at *many 
levels* simultanously, to create stable, interesting systems.

It doesn't deal with complexity "differently" than us - it mostly doesn't 
care, because it's processing power isn't scarce. For the same reason, the 
*huge* coupling in natural system is not that big a problem.

Of course the fun part is that it does manage to create subsystems that use 
higher level heuristics (like us), but those have inherent problems, the chief 
being scarcity.

The wrongness of programming is that it is an optimization of a resource that 
is scarce but becoming less so (computing/thinking power). Such an 
optimization gets old fast and has no alternative to being a "premature 
optimization", a Bad Idea (tm).

Obviously, we should strive to pay as little as possible in lost 
expressiveness, and we do that by continuously trading the proliferating 
computing power for the constained brain power, and both combined for 
expressive "stuff".

Squeak does this in quite a few different ways, and every new one posted is a 
wonder.

Daniel