But if they are pure trial and error, there would be many failures before they get one that's works and nature is seldom that inefficient. Like for example those 8 meters tall termite monoliths built by 1cm size termites.
The interesting thing is, even if they had the whole blueprint in their DNA, they still need to coordinate their building effort, or a loop sided structure can easily go tumbling down.

But how do we quantify potential? Is it measurable? If the 3 or 10% is talking about potential, I'm really interested to know how they arrive at the figure because from my Googling, I have yet to stumble across any of such articles.