I'm watching a bit of a History channel show, and they talked about a small robot being controlled by a culture of neurons from a rat's brain. A while back, I had, in Starsong Systems, a world of mine, a super-tech culture that could not invent AI's. So they took rats, and immobilized them, and connected them to lots of computer power so that you had a very smart rat, or something like a low-powered AI.
Great minds!!!!
Pinky, Are you pondering what I'm pondering?
(Sorry, couldn't resist. ^_^)
"I think so, Brain: if the humans are really so smart, why do they call us 'guinea pigs'?"
--M. J. Young
Narf