There's a spectrum of intellectual ability, and I tend to find myself interested in things far lower on the scale - insects, worms, amoebas, etc. I have a strong interest in GOFAI - pathfinding, goal-oriented action planning, expert systems, etc, and have played a lot over the past decade or two with implementing these things in roguelikes - simple 2D-ish world, sensory stimuli, etc.
So the recent stories about teaching a wad of human neurons to play _DOOM_ and this specific model are pretty interesting to me, even if, again, it's a few orders of magnitude in complexity higher than my focal point.
Are you aware of any similar work that's going on at lower levels with simulations like this? Did TRIBE v1 follow from simpler models or was it "greenfield", so to speak?
(Apologies... I figure I could Google my questions but sometimes I learn more from an HN comment than I would in hours of trying to parse a graph of scientific papers and news articles.)