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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

#81

Post by FrustratedMonky »

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…

I actually take this as a positive, they have uploaded a shell of a 'brain', and have identified the next problem, 'weights'. Why isn't what they have done so far be amazing enough to start tackling the next thing. I am surprised that with Neural Nets being such a hot bed, the amount of money pouring into AI, and NeuralLink type research, that they would have a hard time with funding.

Watching that lego worm really zapped my brain, seemed like we were on the cusp of something. Maybe we still are, and just misjudged the time-scale on progress.

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

#82

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#83

Post by albertzeyer »

yaakov34 wrote: post #31

I was lucky enough to do some programming work, very many years ago, in the 1990s, in the laboratory of Ralph Siegel ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ralph_Siegel_(scientist) ), who among other things worked on this type of worm connectome models. He used the Hodgkin-Huxley equations to simulate neuron responses on the connectome. The Hodkin-Huxley model, as someone explained to me, is kind of like modeling a human le…

> worm neurons are non-spiking

What?

This is the first time I read that. That's fascinating. So they are very different then compared to what we have in humans? How do they work? Where can I read about this?

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

#85

Post by 3cats-in-a-coat »

pouulet wrote: post #84

Reminds me of the first episode of Devs ( https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8134186/ ) where an artificial intelligence engineer does a demo about syncing, and then predicting the future movements of a nematode worm. Great show by the way!

A great show only made greater by the fact it came before LLMs entered the public consciousness, but this concept of having information you extrapolate from with great accuracy is central to the show (all I'll say).

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

#86

Post by XorNot »

chromanoid wrote: post #73
XorNot wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except understanding how a bird can fly had little bearing on building the Wright brothers flyer. And most of the details of bird flight were not exactly discovered till well after commercial air travel was commonplace.

While the exact details were not understood, the mechanics were visible and explainable to some extent. The Wright brothers were at least inspired by birds. https://www.wright-brothers.org/History_Wing/Wright_Story/In... We still don't know how cells in C. elegans work together. It's neither visible nor explainable on a satisfying level.

No but we observably do know that that the connections between cells are important, to the point that by mimicking that we've derived significant benefit.

The Wright flyer didn't flap, and the wings only superficially look like anything a bird has.

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

#87

Post by ramraj07 »

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…

There are a bunch of labs that are making progress in reading the full nervous system (so to speak) realtime in live worms. I like especially the outputs from Andrew Leifer lab in Princeton. I anticipate some very interesting results to come from these labs in the next decade.

I briefly considered doing a postdoc in one of these labs, because I love working worms and agree with your proposition that next logical step in neuroscience is modeling and fully understanding an entire organism. The late Sydney Brenner asked for the same in 2011 [1].

But most academic labs doing well won’t even consider a postdoc application from a student who didn’t work in the exact same field. Solidified my decision to never be part of the Ponzi scheme that is academic research.

The beauty of C. Elegans is that you actually need very little to start working with them. All the strains are available for 10 bucks a pop, you can do most work at room temperature. I only need to invest on a very custom (but not necessarily outrageously expensive) microscope to start working on this topic in my garage. Which I absolutely plan to start in the next few years. I’ve done the math and it’ll cost me less than owning a cheap boat lol. If anyone wants to fund me I’ll be open to it too :)

1. Sydney, B. & Sejnowski, T. J. Understanding the human brain. Science 334, 567 (2011).

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

#89

Post by yaakov34 »

boredumb wrote: post #72
yaakov34 wrote: post #31

I was lucky enough to do some programming work, very many years ago, in the 1990s, in the laboratory of Ralph Siegel ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ralph_Siegel_(scientist) ), who among other things worked on this type of worm connectome models. He used the Hodgkin-Huxley equations to simulate neuron responses on the connectome. The Hodkin-Huxley model, as someone explained to me, is kind of like modeling a human le…

Out of curiosity - were there any commercial applications this was being developed towards?

Ralph's main work was on neural impulses in the visual cortex, and on measurements of various potentials in the living brain. He published a memoir called "Another Day in the Monkey's Brain". I believe he had potential medical applications in mind, but I don't think anything that was close by. Unfortunately, he died of an illness in 2011.

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

#90

Post by max_ »

Noam Chomsky says there are two kinds of AI.

1. The first kind of AI research is more like engineering for example creating self driving cars, language translation & object recognition.

2. The second kind of AI research is trying to replicate the intelligence of living organisms (humans, worms) with models that are consistent with what cognitive scientist have.

An example for such a system is one that would pick up any human language with very little supervision. Like children for example.

Open worm seems like no. 2. Any one have any interesting resources for no. 2 type AI? I would love to explore it some more.

[0]: https://youtu.be/TAP0xk-c4mk

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