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OpenWorm
- mshroyer 5y agoDoes this freak anyone else out just a little? This project is simulating an entire organism, including its neurology. To what extent does running this code create a "real" worm? Sure, it's just C. elegans for now. But over time, we'll gradually see additional projects to simulate larger organisms...
- scollet 5y agoIt's not that freaky for me. I think it's awesome!
- sho_hn 5y agoReminds me of this short fiction: https://qntm.org/mmacevedo https://qntm.org/mmacevedo
- WrtCdEvrydy 5y agoOooh, that was awesome.
- mshroyer 5y agoI hadn't run across that story before, so thanks for sharing it.
- _Microft 5y agoIf you liked that, you might enjoy the Bobiverse series by Dennis E. Taylor. http://dennisetaylor.org/ http://dennisetaylor.org/ https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/32109569-we-are-legion-we-are-bob https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/32109569-we-are-legion-w...
- mshroyer 5y agoOh I think it's an awesome project, too. It's just that it sort of makes concrete what were previously hypothetical arguments about simulating living beings. I can't bring myself to care much about a C. elegans, but let's say we scale this up enough to simulate something the size of a dog plus its environment. Presumably it has subjective experience, like a real dog? What are the ethics of writing code that would result in its "suffering"?
- userbinator 5y agoWhat are the ethics of writing code that would result in its "suffering"? Do you have the same concerns about other, perhaps much simpler but also virtual and pseudointelligent entities, such as computer-controlled players in games? It does raise some deeply philosophical questions about life and what it means in general.
- mshroyer 5y ago> computer-controlled players in games? Nah, I'm not particularly worried about that. Because those are all currently based on models too simple to conceivably have anything like consciousness. On the other hand, once we can simulate a human and its environment at OpenWorm's targeted level of abstraction, presumably we would have a conscious being there?
- reuben364 5y agoThe only consciousness we experience is our own. In the extreme, we can no more say a chair suffers than a human being other than ourselves. Of course we take the pragmatic approach of deciding things that look like suffering to us is suffering.
- mshroyer 5y agoI strongly disagree. The human brain, in its connectome, encompasses enough computational complexity to contain consciousness and suffering. A chair does not, at least not based on any model I've yet seen proposed.
- stefan_ 5y agoDon't worry, it doesn't work.
- mshroyer 5y agoIn what sense does it not work?
- andai 5y agoThe state of the art is described in this blog post (shared by moyix above): https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mHqQxwKuzZS69CXX5/whole-brain-emulation-no-progress-on-c-elgans-after-10-years https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mHqQxwKuzZS69CXX5/whole-brai... Basically, while the structure of the network has been known for decades, they don't yet have the technology to figure out how the neurons behave (the weights of the neurons) nor how they learn (changes in the weights), so they can't "upload" data from a real worm.
- omnicognate 5y agoI'm not an expert in anything relevant to this, so this is ill-informed speculation. But isn't referring to not knowing "the weights" (as the article and researchers do) making a rather large assumption about the nature of the problem? It sounds more like the researchers don't know "why the neurons fire when they do", which would leave open the question of whether "weights" is even a sufficient model.
- taneq 5y agoThis is why I roll my eyes when people say we understand the human brain. We don’t even fully understand what individual neurons are doing.
- thih9 5y agoI find this concept fascinating. > While our ultimate goal is to simulate every [worm] cell in C. elegans, we are starting out by building a model of its body, its nervous system, and its environment. (...) To get a quick idea of what this looks like, check out the latest movie: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SaovWiZJUWY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SaovWiZJUWY Source: https://docs.openworm.org/projects https://docs.openworm.org/projects Also: the “latest video” is seven years old now, does anyone have a newer demo?
- 542458 5y agoThere’s a three year old (low quality) video here. https://youtu.be/M0rpT831ngM https://youtu.be/M0rpT831ngM
- tantalor 5y agoSo it's just simulating the physical model? That's a rather narrow slice of the whole thing. Edit: the real website mentions a lot more like the neural connections https://openworm.org/ https://openworm.org/
- mshroyer 5y agoIt seems likely I'm misunderstanding something, or are you suggesting that C. elegans has a soul?
- beaconstudios 5y agoI think they're talking about just the worm moving, rather than also simulating the worm's CNS/mind.
- tantalor 5y agoI mean simulating muscle contractions treats it like a clockwork machine; that's not very impressive. If you go deeper you can look at internals of cells, metabolism, chemical energy, protein interactions. That's how the worm works. This is like simulating a computer by using a model of RAM and CPU, when you really need to model electricity & magnetism (and stray gamma rays) for a true simulation.
- tantalor 5y agoThis video is a better look at what they're doing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QaCRNX0hdwU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QaCRNX0hdwU
- moyix 5y agoOver at LessWrong niconiconi recently posted a somewhat pessimistic assessment of the last 10 years of progress on emulating C. Elegans, including OpenWorm: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mHqQxwKuzZS69CXX5/whole-brain-emulation-no-progress-on-c-elgans-after-10-years https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mHqQxwKuzZS69CXX5/whole-brai... Apparently there are some signs that progress is being made again now, though...
- nabla9 5y agoC. Elegans is the perfect first candidate for understanding the whole brain of some animal. It doesn't even have spiking neurons. Whole Brain Emulation of merely 302 neurons would not be that hard if we understood how worm brain and neurons work.
- neatze 5y ago> It doesn't even have spiking neurons. What do you mean ? If I recall correctly there was one hobbyist who used Hodgkin-Huxley neurons to emulate movement of warm, it actually trivial task.
- nabla9 5y agoConsider the difference between: Replicating limited outward behaviour with simplified neuron model. vs. Fully simulating the functioning of the neuron so that it does not replicate some observed behaviors, but simulates the brain function accurately at the neuron level. An elegant mind: Learning and memory in Caenorhabditis elegans http://learnmem.cshlp.org/content/17/4/191.long http://learnmem.cshlp.org/content/17/4/191.long
- neatze 5y agoHodgkin-Huxley neurons are fully functioning neurons as far my understanding goes, furthermore, if not mistaken openwarm simulator has ability to simulate hydrodynamics on cellular levels.
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- praveen9920 5y agoThere is a TED talk about the same https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RY2-0-QsuTE&ab_channel=TEDxTalks https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RY2-0-QsuTE&ab_channel=TEDxT...
- chrisallick 5y agoat first glance i thought this would be an opensource virus. which is a fun idea because as its updated it inspires people to patch their code. or an opensource virus that patches vulnerabilities is also fun.
- thrdbndndn 5y agoI thought it's a clone of classic video game, Worms. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worms_(1995_video_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worms_(1995_video_game)
- baq 5y agoI imagine trademark lawyers would deal with that name pretty quickly. But, there are other cute animals which would look good blowing themselves up with bazookas, like hedgehogs. https://www.hedgewars.org/ https://www.hedgewars.org/
- tux3 5y agoYou may be interested in meterpreter and the metasploit framework. It's not an actual worm or virus, because that'd be a little silly, but from automated exploits and a good reverse shell that's a small epsilon away from what you're describing.
- jarrell_mark 5y agoHere's OpenWorm controlling a robot : https://youtu.be/YWQnzylhgHc?t=31 https://youtu.be/YWQnzylhgHc?t=31
- jcun4128 5y agoNot entirely related, I wonder if they have simulations out there for the primordial soup and accelerating it (evolution) so that it hopefully gets to a human brain.
- p1mrx 5y agoThe primordial soup was presumably an Earth-scale massively parallel chemical "computation" with no goal. How would you even begin to simulate that? We at least know roughly what a worm does.
- jcun4128 5y agoYeah idk, the compounds, basic laws of physics, let time accelerate quickly in many iterations.
- Smaug123 5y agoThis is reeeeeaaaaalllllly hard. Remember that protein folding was unsolved five years ago. (I'm not an expert at all, and I can't make a ruling on whether AlphaFold is now generally considered a "solution".) Protein folding is just one small part of physics.
- jcun4128 5y agoYeah I'm not saying it's easy, I know I can't do it now haha. I'm a JS kiddie myself, still have yet to get into this kind of stuff like making a basic 3D simulation, best I got to is 3JS at this time. I'm working on it when I have time. I watched some protein folding stuff from the Comma AI guy I didn't even know what was going on there but it looked cool. But we do have computation readily available, my 3060 is just sitting there while I sleep, I could do some things with it maybe. Granted it's not a super computer, lower end.
- joeberon 5y ago> But we do have computation readily available, my 3060 is just sitting there while I sleep You have vastly overestimated the power of your 3060 if you think it can simulate all the Earth's atoms at the beginning of life here.
- mdp2021 5y agoI see there are also very interesting inputs in previous discussions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8949408 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8949408 - Jan 2015 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8745251 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8745251 - Dec 2014 (OpenWorm in Lego) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7613732 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7613732 - Apr 2014
- agys 5y agoI love this project and I love its name even more…!
- Nezghul 5y agoThere are fields, Neo, endless fields where worms are no longer born...
- brap 5y agoI always thought it would be much less interesting to simulate a worm on a cellular level, and much more interesting to simulate some single-cell organism on an atomic or even subatomic level. The latter feels more like “real life”, IMO. I don’t know which one is more difficult, though. Lots of interesting ethical questions. In the future we might be able to simulate a human on that level. Is it really alive? Does it have rights? If we can “scan” someone and simulate them virtually, are they the same person? If the physical body dies but there’s still a digital copy, can we say they’re still alive?
- karmanyaahm 5y ago> In the future we might be able to simulate a human on that level. Is it really alive? Does it have rights? Purely probabilistically, we are such humans. If any 'base' universe can easily simulate humans, for fun or research, such simulations will soon vastly outnumber the 'real' people. And because of that, we have to assume we are in an ancestor simulation.
- Enginerrrd 5y agoI really disagree with the fundamental assumption there. I find it very difficult to believe that a base universe could ever simulate something of the complexity of our universe without massive and pointless expense, at best. And even if they could, I find it even more unlikely that simulated universes would ever even be dense in the subset of multiverses (whichever flavor your like) which contain something like humans.
- brap 5y agoI agree, and additionally, it might take an awful lot of time until a civilization is advanced enough to reach the point where it can simulate other beings. For all we know, we can be the first beings to ever reach this point.
- tata71 5y ago> If we can “scan” someone and simulate them virtually, are they the same person? If the physical body dies but there’s still a digital copy, can we say they’re still alive? On what grounds?
- sgtnasty 5y agoThis is how the TechnoCore got started.