More news from the Openworm project, whose Kickstarter I posted in April: they’ve sequenced the connectome of all 302 neurons in a C. Elegans worm, simulated them in software, and put them to work driving a Lego robot.
The legobot’s sensors and motors are connected to the software in a way that corresponds to the worm’s sensory apparatus and motor neurons, and the researchers claim that the resulting robotic behaviors are strikingly similar to a C Elegans’ own. The significant thing here is that these behaviors were not programmed: they emerged naturally from mere act of simulating the worm’s neurons.
