If that's the case why are we sending wheeled rovers to mars/moon and not something with legs?
In any case this discussion is going sideways, the point is that nature doesn't have monopoly on being optimal. This also applies to intelligence/learning/modeling something better than brain.
> If that's the case why are we sending wheeled rovers to mars/moon and not something with legs?
Because Mars is a simple and boring environment. Most of its surface, and especially the parts we target with rover missions, are effectively flat sheets peppered with rocks - a decent set of wheels and suspension is close to optimal for navigating such terrain.
Now, if we were to send missions to a planet that's mostly forests and rivers, like Earth used to be, then wheels wouldn't cut it - not before cutting down some of the forests first.
> the point is that nature doesn't have monopoly on being optimal. This also applies to intelligence/learning/modeling something better than brain.
Fair enough. Nature doesn't do globally optimal - but it makes things heavily optimized for their environment. That's why our planes are nowhere near as energy-efficient in flying as birds are, but birds cannot travel as far and as fast as our planes can.
Exactly, same with intelligence - it's polluted with emotions and all kind of "nonsense" - but it doesn't have to. We can create emotionless, super-intelligent machines exceeding human capability by far (and use them as hammers). No need to imitate every detail of the brain to extract intelligence.
The counter to this is you can end up with an exceptionally powerful, but unaligned AI, which presents a new series of 'known unknowns' and 'unknown unknowns' that we have to deal with.
> We don't need to match number of neural connections in human brain to exceed its intelligence.
That's also true because of wheels/road thing, in that we can "cheat" here too. More specifically, some of the neural connections in the human brain are dedicated to sensing, processing and controlling the dynamic state of human body. Purely-software AIs don't need those for intelligence.
Legged-robot technology is still very immature, even more so when the rover was designed. Wheels work well on relatively flat Martian terrain and are a lot less likely to break than robot legs.
Interestingly the latest Mars rover also includes a small helicopter, another technology which requires spinning something on a bearing and does not commonly exist in nature.
In any case this discussion is going sideways, the point is that nature doesn't have monopoly on being optimal. This also applies to intelligence/learning/modeling something better than brain.