I’d estimate We are 5 to 10 years away from somewhat deciding the effective connectome and “algorithms” of the roundworm which just has a few hundred neurons. We know every neuron in it by name and know how they all connect to each other, yet we have very little clue how they all end up creating the behavior we see in the worm. We are quite far away from truly mapping every neurons connection and functional effect in a fruit fly which has tens of thousands of neurons.

I'll ask this here, because I'm curious, and it seems that you've read at least a little on this subject...

Is it known how much individual variation there is between different roundworm brains? If you grow two roundworms, even from the same DNA, does the resulting brain have all the same wiring, or is it different based on environmental factors?

I ask because I thought that brain growth involves a feedback loop, where individual experiences during maturation influence the actual physical structure of the brain to some degree.

In a round worm, the neural structure is remarkably constant. The exact same number of neurons emerge and form the exact same network in every worm! But in each worm they might move a bit around slightly especially in their head region which makes quick identification a little hard!

But you can see why this makes the worm the best first organism to decipher the full neural network in. In my opinion not enough people are working on this. There are maybe 5 labs that are working on this topic at this moment!

10 years is barely enough for building a working connectome (a model of brain which use to react in a somewhat similar way to a C.Elegance's brain while consuming tens of KW or more).

Building not even an organism but at least a brain in vitro is impossible in any observable future even for C.Elegance, nothing to say about a fruit fly.

We can not even build a working model of Solar System with ability to Rev/FF in at least a 1000 years and you are talking about one of the most complicated things in Universe.

There's already been "synthetic organisms" built ... Start with the DNA of a simple organism, edit the genetic code, then synthesize this new DNA and insert into a host cell who's DNA has been removed.

I think we're still a long way from designing an organism from scratch though, as opposed to "editing" an existing one.