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This article reminds me this reflexion at the end of a paper I wrote a few monts ago in http://epsilonwiki.free.fr/lambdaway/?view=lambda_calculus :

« Church numbers could be seen as tiny CPUs, small primitive engines ready to iterate. Not dead datas stored in a memory and sequentially given to some CPU iterating on them, but an arborescent structure of CPUs interacting in a de facto parallel process. Maybe it's how Google's data centers work. Maybe it's how our brain works, full of Church neurons. Why not ? [...]. »

Don't blame me if it is out the topic, but I wonder what some smart person could think about that? Thanks.

> The researchers found, for instance, that disabling one particular group of transistors prevented the chip from running the boot-up sequence of “Donkey Kong”—the Nintendo game that introduced Mario the plumber to the world—while preserving its ability to run other games. But it would be a mistake, Dr Jonas points out, to conclude that those transistors were thus uniquely responsible for “Donkey Kong”. The truth is more subtle. They are instead part of a circuit which implements a much more basic computing function that is crucial for loading one piece of software, but not some others.

This is blindingly obvious in hindsight, but not something I had ever considered before. Really cool article.