Advanced Parallax Propeller Robot Big Brain

Below you mentioned making an LED machine that controlled 32 LEDs with 32 ports.  I presume you know that those 32 ports could run more than just 32 LEDs if you laid the LEDs out in a matrix or crisscross connections? One easy connection to picture is making a 16 by 16 matrix and using 16 of the ports on the horizontals and the other 16 on the verticals. That would allow you to light 256 individual LEDs with the right leads turned on and off... A little harder to picture is that you are not limited to 256, in that each place one of those LEDs are, there could be another one wired in the opposite direction, for 512 LEDs controlled or 256 bi-color ones. It is actually possible to add a few more that only turn on when both their horizontal and vertical leads are on and the other side of those LEDs go to common ground, but these require additional logic gates and are more trouble than they are worth, so 512 is the easiest practical number you could turn on or off individually without additional support chips or diodes. (The limit I see if you did wish to add additional decoding would be the same as the number of individual memory addresses a chip could address if those 32 ports were address leads...  2^32 or 4,294,967,296. In the case of LEDs I think the practical limit would be only half that number or less.

Know anyone who wants to light up a billion or more LEDs from the same control chip? --No, of course not.   However, it does bring me to my secondary thoughts on this matter. What if each of those 32 leads hooked to each of 32 different other propeller chips? In this you start to build a synaptic network. On a more practical level, what if you used 16 of those 32 as axons (transmitters) and the other 16 as dendrites (receivers) to interconnect to other propeller "brain cells"?  (--And at the moment I am ignoring any matrix-style connections between propellers, but I'm sure you can see that such is possible.) Anyway, you have the capacity to emulate the brain in even greater detail by interconnecting each propeller to 16 other propellers, each with its own transmit/receive pair. No individual propellers would interconnect to all the same 16 as another propeller does, but there would be overlapping allowing multiple paths to the same place. Once you get enough interconnections going you could begin to process things in a way similar to a living brain.

A typical neuron has between 1,000 to 10,000 synapses (that is, it communicates with 1,000-10,000 other neurons, muscle cells, glands, etc.). Plus there are about 100 billion brain cells in a human brain. It will be a long time before a model like this could be built, but how could we have more interconnections? If we used a matrix layout, we can increase the number of interconnections available from each propeller chip to others, without added hardware --in the same way we were going to use the ports to address a matrix of 256 individual LEDs, (16 squared), we could interconnect to 256 other propeller chips.

--But what a programming headache...!   ha ha