Challenges for intelligent systems in biology

Biological processes have produced the ultimate intelligent system (humans), and now we are trying to understand biology (and ourselves) by building intelligent systems. Intelligent systems research in biology strives to understand how living systems perform difficult tasks routinely (ranging from molecular phenomena such as protein-folding to organism-level phenomena such as cognition). The definition of intelligent systems in biology can lead to hours of debate. Some say that all high-performance systems that do something difficult with (or to) biological data should be considered intelligent systems. Others insist that the term intelligent system should be reserved for systems using the methods typically associated with modem AI.