Agreed. Also, sentences like "I mastered the ability to combine several strategies, each with varying strengths and weaknesses, highlighting the strengths and nullifying the weaknesses" are no good. What strengths? What weaknesses? When I read something like that, it says to me (or perhaps screams?) that nothing substantial was actually accomplished. Definitely in need of rewording to make things far more concrete.
I learned how to work with a team to set goals, outline those goals in a design document, and accomplish those goals in code within a very small timeframe.
Is HR gobbledygook, and doesn't tell me anything about what he was doing, why or how hard it was. Unless I find something cool while searching for "Andrew Horner" <programming language that I'm hiring for> on Google, his resume doesn't stand out.
Recreating the source code by itself does not, in this case, constitute a "model". In order to actually run that binary, you also need to create a virtual computer for it to inhabit.
The chicken-and-egg problem can take a certain amount of effort to solve, but it's not a major engineering obstacle.
The easiest way to bootstrap a self-compiling compiler from bare metal is probably by writing a Forth inner interpreter in machine code, which is a few hundred bytes; a Forth outer interpreter in threaded code, which is a few hundred cells; and then an interpreter for the language of your compiler in Forth, which is likely to be a few dozen to a few thousand lines of code, depending on the language. (I don't know if Forth is good for anything else, but it's optimal for this.)
I don't know how to estimate this task properly, but I doubt it's more than a few weeks of work for a skilled person.
But the claim wasn't that having the genome is directly useful, rather that it's a decent approximation of the upper bound on the irreducible complexity.
The first study you link to does not appear to address the correlation/causation issue whatsoever. Specifically: "The study acknowledges that people who regularly run marathons, like many of the study's participants, may be genetically predisposed to running long distances."
The second link describing neurogenesis stimulation is more interesting due to the fact that they are tracking actual changes in the participants over the course of the study.
For the record, I do not doubt for a moment that exercise has numerous positive benefits, both physically and mentally.
A possible (somewhat sci-fi) future extension to this idea would be directly monitoring the brain of the subject, in conjunction with eye movements, in an attempt to quickly detect a subconscious signal of 'recognition' while scanning the computer-generated faces. Might be that certain signals in the brainwave (e.g. the P300 or something similar: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P300_%28neuroscience%29 ) could be used for this purpose.
In my opinion, rather than attempting to simulate progressively larger brains, we should instead focus on really nailing the details of smaller ones, perhaps starting with insects.
As an example, Portia jumping spiders display very complex hunting behaviors, including trial-and-error learning in novel circumstances. Even with tiny eyes, they have the visual acuity of a cat. However, unlike a cat, they are only able to see a small portion of the visual field at a time, and must therefore scan the environment, keeping the rest of what has been scanned in memory. Portia spiders are known to spend up to an hour "analyzing" their environment before deciding on a course of action! Their sharp eyesight allows them to recognize the species of the spider they are currently stalking. One common tactic is to pluck deceptively at the web of their victim in order to manipulate it into reacting and moving into a more favorable position before the attack. Different species of spiders will respond in different ways, and so the Portia learn to intelligently apply different patterns of plucking to fit the circumstances. When encountering an unknown type of spider, Portia will try various experimental plucking motions, the successful results of which will be remembered and reused correctly in future attacks.
This amazingly rich and adaptive behavior it somehow manages to produce with a mere 500k neurons; about 2000 times less than the number used by Blue Gene in the experiment.
