

Openworm: c.elegans worm simulation - mike_esspe
https://code.google.com/p/openworm/

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Scene_Cast2
This is definitely the way forward.

In the past, the research has focused on re-creating non-trivial neural
networks. However, the network is nothing without the organism - sure, you can
examine the internal oscillations - but that hasn't led us anywhere. (See
"Perfect C.Elegans" research paper, 1998). One can't debug without seeing the
results, and that's the case with a neural network without the rest of the
organism.

Why C.Elegans? It's the simplest organism with a nervous system (302 neurons),
and the connectivity has been completely mapped. It's a hermaphrodite, with a
fully-sequenced DNA. It's also one of the more studied organisms out there.

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pavel_lishin
So, how long until we're sending Russian lobsters into space?

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bobds
The lobsters weren't Russian. They were uploaded in San Diego.

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jlgreco
They did hack into the Moscow Windows NT User Group to escape though.

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jl6
Best of luck to them. I hope they succeed to the point where interesting
ethical issues are raised.

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slurgfest
Considering that nobody outside the jains seems to think there is an ethical
issue with experimenting on invertebrates like insects, and those are
significantly more complex than c. elegans...

and that not even the jains have said anything about computer programs
symbolically representing a real animal...

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Scene_Cast2
I think what he meant was: "Let's hope that this research leads to some
simulated animals [much later down the road]".

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jryce
I might be asking a dumb question here but can it be possible to eventually
simulate the worm's reproduction cycle so that we can fast forward the
simulation to millions or even billions of generations to see more complex
organisms evolving?

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slurgfest
It's not a model of the worm's genome, let alone its full development required
to actually produce the worms, let alone of populations of the worms, let
alone populations of the worms interacting with a full blown natural
environment. Which is what determines what happens in natural selection.

Evolution does not naturally tend toward complexity, it tends toward fit to
the environment. In one case that may be specializing in eating eucalyptus
leaves. In another case it might be having a big brain. We tend to think that
the whole direction of evolution is toward producing us but there is no basis
for that in evolutionary theory. We ended up with particular traits because
they were available in our population and gave our ancestors a leg up in their
specific environments.

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christiangenco
Looks like the beginning of Permutation City[1] - won't be long now
(relatively) until we won't be able to observe a difference between real
c.elegans and simulated c.elegans, simulate its environment, simulate other
organisms, etc. Will these worms be _alive_? What happens when computers
become advanced enough to simulate humans? What if they already are? o_O

1\. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permutation_City>

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drostie
Well, hold on a second. Even if we know the worm's neural network and how it's
connected, that doesn't necessarily mean that a computer simulation of it will
do exactly what the worm does. The problem is that we're not doing an atom-by-
atom simulation of the worm but rather we're hoping we've extracted the
important logical features of how the worm works, so that the thing will run
on modern computers.

This is actually the more exciting part of the research. Serious ethical
questions aside[1], imagine if you _could_ simulate a human's neural network.
Probably your first simulation would seem unbelievably stupid. Perhaps you
find out that you didn't account for the ways certain neurotransmitter
concentrations will "leak" data from one synapse to a nearby one, without
which the system becomes radically disconnected because evolution was lazy and
connected them without a specific wire. (I don't know; I'm being
hypothetical.) So now you get to introduce some sort of adjacency matrix which
manages which neurons are "next to" each other and receive these "secondary
signals." Then it seems to be able to learn language, but it still can't
balance in the world, and working it out, you find out that there is a big
failure in the motor regions because they only work when the right signal
propagation delays are introduced, and you were propagating them all
instantaneously, and so on.

In the distant past, we had hoped that chess was so complicated that it would
only be solved with some great insight into human understanding -- but instead
it was solved with brute force. This is one of the first cases where I see
that the brute force might be finally able to give us a test model by which we
might better understand understanding itself.

The only worrying bit is the neural nets themselves. Neural nets are
notoriously difficult to interpret and understand. Even the calculus-based
approach of "I'm going to make a tiny tweak to the network and see how it
changes the output" offers only a little enlightenment.

[1] I do think ethical questions about killing artificial consciousnesses
deserve discussion time; I just don't have much to spare at this moment and
it's kinda tangential.

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erikb
I like the way they are executing it. Interacting with the people, not just
sitting in the lab doing random science.

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tocomment
Would doing a kickstarter be useful for these folks?

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w1kke
It is part of their roadmap:

Component: Kickstarter EPIC-8 As an open worm team member, I want to launch a
fundraising campaign to raise money for the project

taken from <https://code.google.com/p/openworm/wiki/Roadmap>

