Wriggling worm is breakthrough for artificial life
Early efforts to construct an artificial life form in a software model have reached a milestone as a digital worm begins to squirm in the same way that real animals are observed to
An ambitious project to recreate an entire roundworm, cell by cell, in a
software model has reached a crucial breakthrough as the digital animal
wriggled for the first time.
The OpenWorm project brings
together scientists and programmers from around the world in the common goal
of entirely recreating the structure and behaviour of Caenorhabditis elegans
inside a machine.
The 1mm worm lives in warm soil and was the first multi-cellular organism to
have its whole genome completely sequenced. The creature is the perfect
candidate for the project because it exhibits relatively advanced behaviour
such as finding a mate and avoiding predators despite being composed of just
1,000 cells, and has been the focus of a huge amount of scientific research.
All of the basic elements of the creature are being created in software from
the bottom-up. It is hoped that the observed behaviour of real worms will
eventually emerge once the model is adequately accurate. Each cell in the
animal is being simulated one-by-one, along with neuron links between them,
inside a new simulation environment called Geppetto.
The latest version of the model has now been shown to move and writhe in the
same way and at the same speed as the real roundworm, showing that the team
are making progress towards their ultimate goal, although the latest
demonstration was driven by hard-coded instructions rather than the "synthetic
brain" currently under development and comprised of 302 neurons.
