It seems clear at this point that although computers can be made to model physical systems to great degree, this is not the area where they naturally excel. Think of modeling the temperature of a room, you could try and recreate the physically accurate simulation of every particle and its velocity. We could then create better software to model the particles on ever more powerful and specific hardware to model bigger and bigger rooms.
Just like how thermodynamics might make more sense to model statistically, I think intelligence is not best modeled at the synapse layer.
I think the much more interesting question is what would the equivalent of a worm brain be for a digital intelligence?