Can someone shed some light on what makes this a problem worth investigating for decades, if at all?
One example is that stephen wolfram argues, I think compellingly, that machine learning “hitches on to” chaotic systems defined by simple rules and rides them for a certain number of steps in order to produce complex behaviors. If this is true, easily going in the reverse direction could give us lots of insight into ML.
can we construct a warm winter garment without having to manually pick open cotton poppies?
if we place energy in the right location, can we have slime mold do computation for us?
how do we organize matter and energy in order to watch a funny cat video?