OpenWorm – A computational model of C. elegans worm
As a founding member of OpenWorm, I emulated the connectome and applied it to robotics almost 10 years ago (<a href="https://youtu.be/YWQnzylhgHc" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://youtu.be/YWQnzylhgHc</a>). In this experiment, each neuron is represented as a single program and uses UDP messaging to communicate between the individual neurons (programs). There was a number of issues I ran into and probably #1 is the fact that connectomes are highly recurrent which in my experiment lead to what I called UDP stacking; i.e. the activations (UDP messages) come in faster than the program can process them.<p>I have downloaded the complete (so far) Drosphilia connectome and working to create an emulation. I am exploring Hypervectors to emulate neurons or neuropils but still working on the concept. I have tried many other ideas including Adjacency Matrices and Function programming where each Function is some part of the animal nervous system (e.g. with C elegans think Sensory, Interneuron and Motor as 3 distinct functions and programs).<p>The C elegans emulation was also done in a single Python app, translated to several other programming languages, that also showed clear emulation in many different robots. Ablation tests demonstrated how the emulated nervous system is congruent to the biological nervous system through observable behaviors of both.<p>There are two extremes on the evolutionary continuum of nervous systems with the  worm's brain on one end and the human brain on the other. However, even with the Worm's nervous system, we can clearly see general intelligence and a gateway to AGI.