[Hope you do not mind the English in this fine mag.]
Mind you, worms ain"t that smart.

It seems to me that when you say _smartest_, you mean your local Pentium III machine (or something close).

How up-to-date are you on AI projects? It so happens that advanced projects, such as CYC (developed by Doug Lenat and team, at CyCorp), are far more advanced than worms (albeit they are a little behind on their biological process management...)

CYC has abilities that emulate common sense to a degree that enables it to understand complicated sentences (aka natural language parsing) and make non-trivial associations and inferences based on its input.

It is true that AI research is still far from HAL or anything *remotely* close to it. But it is *not* true that AI today has pathetic achievements.

Your comparison to a worm reeks of journalistic tendencies to belittle-or-aggrandize-no-matter-what.

Hope this serves to change an opinion for some of you.

S.