A Robot Controlled By The Brain Of A Worm.

Scientists believe they could be on the brink of creating artificial life after they digitized the brain of a worm and successfully placed it inside a robot. Believe it or not, Scientists and Researchers with the Open Worm project took the connections between the 302 neurons of a worm’s brain and simulated them in software, which they uploaded to a simple robot made of Legos. Beneath the skin of a simple worm with transparent skin, there are 302 neurons that have been mapped meticulously by researchers in what is known as a connectome.

Scientists across the world have studied the neuron systems and patterns of one millimeter long worms and now they have transplanted their nervous system into the body of a Lego Mindstorms EV3 robot. What is the reason of doing this brain wiring of a robot using a worm's brain? OpenWorm is an organization dedicated to creating the world’s first virtual organism in a computer with the main aim of understanding of how the human brain works. For the same purpose they first needed to understand how smaller brains work for instance, to understand how the brain of a worm works. Thus scientists reverse-engineered the worm’s neural networks using sensors and software and used the UDP packets to fire neurons whenever the robot comes in a range of 20 centimeters to an object. Incredibly, they discovered that the bionic simulation behaved in exactly the same way as a real worm — despite the fact that they'd never coded its actual behavior. "The key point is that there was no programming or learning involved to create the behaviours," said artificial intelligence expert Lucy Black, on the I Programmer blog, adding "The connectome of the worm was mapped and implemented as a software system and the behaviours emerge. … It is difficult to understand how it works — but it does," The ultimate goal of the OpenWorm project is to completely replicate the entire nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans, and not just its brain, that was used in the experiment. The OpenWorm project chose the roundworm because of its simple structure of just 1,000 cells — of which only 302 are neurons. It also has just 7,000 connections or synapses. In comparison, the human brain has 86 billion neurons and a whooping 100 trillion synapses. This is gigantic to think from the perspective of a worm. The simulation using worm's brain is not quite perfect and the neuron firing trigger is still not up to the mark with some simplifications still needed to be made. But we should not forget that we need to learn how to crawl before we can walk. So the first attempt is well above the expectations and further studies will definitely shed more light on the understanding of how actually the brain works.