Form of artificial life

With a transparent and extremely small appearance, the worm Caenorhabditis elegans is much more complex than its long and hard-to-remember name. Now, a new project promises to provide everything the scientific world needs to know in an effort to create artificial life forms.

Named OpenWorm , roughly translated as Open Worms, the project is described as an open attempt to create the first virtual creature on the computer: C.elegans nematode. Experts' arguments are as follows: How can we speed up research on the human brain if even the worm brain is not fully understood? The reason scientists choose this worm is because they have the ability to escape enemies, eat, learn and find partners in the brain a total of 302 neurons, according to ExtremeTech.com.

3D model of nematode neurons - (Photo: New World Notes)

Therefore, an international team of neuroscientists and software engineers decided to concentrate all available data on the worm, including a general map of all nerve connections in the brain. That data warehouse can be manipulated using the OpenWorm model , called Geppetto , known in the Java language. The entire code is published on GitHub under license from Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

In fact, you need programming skills to jump into the OpenWorm world and start exploring, but the purpose of this project is to attract civilians as well as those interested in telecom. scenes of virtual worms that live inside their computers. Of course, the worm object here serves positively, not destructive computer worms.

Besides the task of stepping up the work of human brain research, the OpenWorm project can also speed up the search for treatments for devastating human diseases like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. So far, OpenWorm has simultaneously developed parallel projects, including mechanical stimulants as well as explanations of ion channels and associated joints in each cell of the worm's brain.

Currently OpenWorm still has some limitations. One of the project members estimated that it would take several months before someone could download the virtual creature. However, when the time has come, programmers and scientific experts can ensure that the virtual life form will be exactly the same as the biological one. And the results will be available online for free to those who want to develop other forms of artificial life.