The OpenWorm Project
December 23rd, 2013Via: Telegraph:
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.
