[hawkice]

This is one of those times where I think the discussion might be confusing one hard problem with a slightly hard problem that's hard to scale. It seems like the hard problem is understanding how to model how neurons interact with enough precision to get a meaningful picture of how they do what they do. Once we have that, I'm not sure the difference between 302 and 100,000 and 100,000,000,000 will be _fundamentally more difficult_ and not just much more expensive to get going.

That being said, modelling neurons is a tough problem we haven't figured out. All the problems we _do_ figure out kind of accumulate, so programs can be written faster if you're trying to make something where you can get more and more parts off the shelf. I'm not sure this is a topic that demands an analogy. We all understand how to write programs and what makes it easier to do so -- having a cool API or library, ya know, that helps. No metaphor needed.