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OpenWorm – A computational model of C. elegans worm

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Re: OpenWorm – A computational model of C. elegans worm

#51

Post by Gordonjcp »

lukasday wrote: post #34

I love it when anything Caenorhabditis elegans (C. Elegans) related pops up because this little biological organism sits at this beautiful intersection between technology and biology and philosophy. The successful emulation of C. Elegans would represent a concrete step towards whole brain emulation and all the transhuman and ethical and moral quandaries that would bring. The general idea is that the human brain has b…

What would a "real world" application of this be? Could I for example chuck a bunch of simulated worms onto a map and have it solve a route? "Given enough worms, all Travelling Salesman problems are shallow?"

Re: OpenWorm – A computational model of C. elegans worm

#53

Post by lionkor »

Geee wrote: post #45

Waiting for the day when we can observe an actual worm and predict its movements exactly by simulating them ahead of time.

That's part of the scientific process, and probably the most valuable part (that sets it apart from e.g. religion).

It's very exciting to me when a theory makes predictions, and those predictions turn out to be true - it's beautiful.

Re: OpenWorm – A computational model of C. elegans worm

#54

Post by ben_w »

bombolo wrote: post #3
c7DJTLrn wrote: post #2

So is this an exact digital replica of a worm?

How can we exactly replicate something if we don't even know all the laws of physics?

My cellular biochemistry does a pretty good job of replicating itself with absolutely no understanding whatsoever of how to resolve the contradictions between general relativity and quantum mechanics.

When it comes to brains, I don't know if anyone knows what might be the simplest sufficient model that would usefully replicate them, even if you specify "usefully" well enough to know if this is about fundamentals of intelligence or about the impact of drugs on cognition, which are two completely different standards.

For example, perceptrons are a toy model, but modern AI can do more in (breadth XOR single-skill performance in various domains) than any single human, even with much smaller parameter counts than we have synapses; but the broad-skilled ones also mess up in inhuman ways, like being equally good at advanced calculus as basic arithmetic, or being a poet at the level of stereotypical teenager but in every language simultaneously.

If anyone's made a neutral network that can get high on simulated caffeine — and I'm not saying it hasn't been done — it's not reached any of the places I follow discussions on this kind of thing. (Google didn't help, results were about software named Caffeine and non-artificial neurones).

Re: OpenWorm – A computational model of C. elegans worm

#55

Post by Maxion »

miohtama wrote: post #46
weinzierl wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In addition to that, these neurons are also quite different from the ones in mammals, "The neurons do not fire action potentials, and do not express any voltage-gated sodium channels." [1] That makes the fact that it can develop a nicotine addiction even more fascinating. "Nicotine dependence can also be studied using C. elegans because it exhibits behavioral responses to nicotine that parallel those of mammals. Thes…

Next: OpenSmoker.py

Lol imagine your IDE becoming addicted to smoking, and refusing to auto-complete or save files before you buy it more virtual cigarettes.

Re: OpenWorm – A computational model of C. elegans worm

#56

Post by Legend2440 »

bombolo wrote: post #3
c7DJTLrn wrote: post #2

So is this an exact digital replica of a worm?

How can we exactly replicate something if we don't even know all the laws of physics?

Abstraction. You don't need to know what's going on at the quantum level because higher-level simulations can capture all the properties you care about.

Re: OpenWorm – A computational model of C. elegans worm

#57

Post by circuit10 »

nightsd01 wrote: post #16
circuit10 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Replicating something exactly is a lot harder than making something that does the same thing in a different way. We can build planes that travel far faster than a bird could but that doesn’t mean it’s easy for us to exactly replicate how a bird flies, so I don’t think this says anything about how far away we are from a superintelligence

The bird and the airplane is such an excellent analogy!

I got it from a video I saw so I didn’t make it myself

https://youtube.com/watch?v=eaYIU6YXr3w?t=106

I’m not sure the timestamp works but it’s at 1:46

Re: OpenWorm – A computational model of C. elegans worm

#60

Post by burning_hamster »

weinzierl wrote: post #27
nightsd01 wrote: post #13

302 neurons doesn’t sound impressive to people who may be used to working with 7B+ parameter neural networks. But those neural networks have about as much in common with a biological neuron as a bicycle had with a horse. They can both travel pretty fast but one evolved naturally through over a billion years of harsh natural selection, and the other is a precisely tuned metal machine with a single purpose. Neurons are…

In addition to that, these neurons are also quite different from the ones in mammals, "The neurons do not fire action potentials, and do not express any voltage-gated sodium channels." [1] That makes the fact that it can develop a nicotine addiction even more fascinating. "Nicotine dependence can also be studied using C. elegans because it exhibits behavioral responses to nicotine that parallel those of mammals. Thes…

> "The neurons do not fire action potentials, and do not express any voltage-gated sodium channels."

This an old and incorrect belief that largely derives from the difficulty of putting electrodes into their teeny, tiny neurons. Close relatives of C elegans that are larger (and hence more easily experimented on) do have action potentials, and for some neurons in C elegans, we also have good evidence of action potentials [1, 2]. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

[1] Lockery SR, Goodman MB. The quest for action potentials in C. elegans neurons hits a plateau. Nat Neurosci. 2009 Apr;12(4):377-8. doi: 10.1038/nn0409-377. PMID: 19322241; PMCID: PMC3951993.

[2] Jiang, J., Su, Y., Zhang, R. et al. C. elegans enteric motor neurons fire synchronized action potentials underlying the defecation motor program. Nat Commun 13, 2783 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-022-30452-y

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