A Worm's Mind In a Lego Body

mikejuk writes The nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans (C. elegans) is tiny and only has 302 neurons. These have been completely mapped, and one of the founders of the OpenWorm project, Timothy Busbice, has taken the connectome and implemented an object oriented neuron program. The neurons communicate by sending UDP packets across the network. The software works with sensors and effectors provided by a simple LEGO robot. The sensors are sampled every 100ms. For example, the sonar sensor on the robot is wired as the worm's nose. If anything comes within 20cm of the 'nose' then UDP packets are sent to the sensory neurons in the network. The motor neurons are wired up to the left and right motors of the robot. It is claimed that the robot behaved in ways that are similar to observed C. elegans. Stimulation of the nose stopped forward motion. Touching the anterior and posterior touch sensors made the robot move forward and back accordingly. Stimulating the food sensor made the robot move forward. The key point is that there was no programming or learning involved to create the behaviors. The connectome of the worm was mapped and implemented as a software system and the behaviors emerge. Is the robot a C. elegans in a different body or is it something quite new? Is it alive? These are questions for philosophers, but it does suggest that the ghost in the machine is just the machine. The important question is does it scale?

Comments

Put the glasses on, stupid.

[ColdWetDog]

Initially read it as "A Woman's Mind in a Lego Body". Wasn't quite sure where to go from there so I squinted a little bit. Fortunately Timothy saved me from having to explain to my wife just what 'that stupid Slashdot article" is about.

Re:Put the glasses on, stupid.

[Anonymous Coward]

As the article mentions, this isn't too interesting to AI developers. We already know how neural networks work and some are turning complete so they can do anything. What we aren't good at is designing them. Add a connection here or there, set the weight to .000803 or .0040075, switching to pulsating, or whatever. We don't know. Instead we run thousands upon thousands of simulations that use other AI algorithms to make the networks for us.

We haven't scaled up to human levels because there's so much more to complex brains. There's some sort of cross talk with chemicals, other chemicals coating neurons to make them fire differently, neurons growing together or apart, cells dying, new cells emerging, etc... Now maybe all that's not needed, good enough is fine for evolution, but were not at that level yet.

There are human-level brain simulations being worked on, but I haven't been following them closely. I don't think they're implementing everything. Actually, I know they aren't because we keep discovering new things. Are they working off and standard model of the human brain or a specific person's brain?

It would be more ground breaking if someone did the reverse. Engineer a neural network then grow it into another animal. That would be new, but due to the nature of neural networks, we also already know it would work.

No programming?

[tomhath]

The key point is that there was no programming or learning involved to create the behaviors.

Yes, there was. The behaviors didn't just "emerge", they're coded into the robot.

Re:No programming?

[Kjella]

If you call copy-paste programming. They took an "executable", dumped it from the worm's brain, put it in a robot and found it acts like a worm. The behavior emerged through evolution and was encoded in the neurons by nature, not the researchers. If you could dump a human brain, put it in a robot and have it act like a human without ever "reverse engineering" it that would be most impressive.

Re:No programming?

[teslar]

The behavior emerged through evolution and was encoded in the neurons by nature

What has been implemented in this robot has nothing to do with biological neurons of C. elegans.

The robot uses integrate-and-fire neurons. The "signal" sent from pre- to postsynaptic neuron is an integer equal to the number of connection between the neurons in the real worm. If the sum of input exceeds a threshold, the neuron "fires" (sidenote: right here's a bit of programming: how did the threshold values get chosen?).

C. elegans neurons do not "fire" (they are not spiking neurons and lack Na+ channels) but use calcium-based analog signals.

The body does matter too. C elegans has muscles on either side that it contracts alternately to move in a sinusoidal fashion. Not wheels. C elegans locomotion does not work like wheeled locomotion.

So, yes, you are right, C elegans neurons encode behaviour appropriate for a C elegans body given the biology of the neurons available here. None of this, however, makes it into this robot. An abstraction of the connectome does (C elegans has both electrical and chemical synapses; that distinction seems to be lost here too) and that's it.

It is kinda cool that the connectome does seem to naturally implement some basic response patterns; but given that muscles have been replaced by wheels, I'm not sure how meaningful that actually is.

Re:No programming?

[Tyr07]

Actually they did just emerge.

You see, these neurons were wired in the living worm to send signals to different parts of the body. A signal from its nose, in the real worm, would go to a neuron, which would fire other neurons, that caused it to stop moving. This happened by sending a signal to other neurons which then sent them down to parts of the body.

What they did, was use UDP packets to be the 'signal', and then sent electrical currents down to the robotic corresponding parts as the original living worm did, which resulted in the same behavior.

They didn't put a chip in where it goes if range 20cm stop. They mimicked the worm and said if range 20cm send signal to neuron C. Neuron C in the worm and robot goes if receive signal, send electrical pulse to wire C. Wire C causes it to stop motion.

So behaviors emerged, were not "programmed" so to speak.

Does it scale?

[Anonymous Coward]

Try Duplo.

Memory mapping?

[Kevin Fishburne]

Emulating the connectivity and functionality of neurons is pretty awesome, but it would seem the next logical step would be to map and interpret how memories are stored and processed, as well as organ feedback (skin, smell, glands). What's really interesting about this is that it shows, at least to some degree, that a simple brain can be reproduced using mathematical relationships (programming) and "run" with a I/O feedback loop. As far as the philosophical stuff, I think eventually we'll be forced to accept that life is a type of machine and that the "ghost" is an illusion emerging from its complexity. Other than better neuroscience, the main thing holding us back is pride.

Re:Memory mapping?

[Kjella]

Emulating the connectivity and functionality of neurons is pretty awesome, but it would seem the next logical step would be to map and interpret how memories are stored and processed,

We actually have a fairly good clue on how the brain stores information chemically, but that's all but useless without understanding the neurons because they're the ones that disperse a memory during storage and gather all the sensory clues to trigger semantic meaning like recognizing a person's voice as well as all the associations related to that person during retrieval. It's not like computers with a storage unit, all neurons can store information and it also modifies their behavior so the memory and path to the memory is integrated and extremely multi-path, you can read a person's name or see their photo or smell their perfume and it all triggers the same memory.

In particular it seems we have two very different kinds of associations, one that tries to join same with same like how one person looks similar to somebody else, the other hooking up disjoint information that this name belongs to this face and the former seems to go by brain centers so we get these nice macro maps of what happens where. I guess that's great for those trying to create machine vision or something like that, but for AI it's the links between the sights, sound, smells, tactile and semantic information that matter and you don't understand those without understanding the micro scale, what hooks those two particular pieces of information together.

Re:Memory mapping?

[WillAdams]

More importantly, the Bible tells those who believe in it that nothing is unknowable: Genesis 11:6

>The Lord said, “If as one people speaking the same language
>they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do
>will be impossible for them.

So it's blasphemous for Christians (or Jews or Muslims) to say that humanity can't understand such things (or anything).

This isn't about technological developments,

[Shadow of Eternity]

it's about moral ones. If we make a perfectly simulated animal brain and it works just like the real thing does that mean we've made an animal? Do we consider that animal to be alive? Does it have less "worth" than a flesh and blood creature? Better that we answer these questions now than when we have robots asking us if they have a soul.

Re:This isn't about technological developments,

[linuxrocks123]

Instead of calling everyone around you an idiot, why don't you read the question again and consider again what is being asked.

Unless you have absolutely no ethical qualms about what Dr. Mengele did to his experimental subjects, the ethical questions raised by emulating a complete human brain are in no way trivial and in no way unimportant. Right now, we reformat computers, turn them off, turn them on, and don't and don't have to care at all about what they "want" or about treating them with any kind of respect. If we successfully simulate a human brain to the point where it can "think" and has humanlike "emotions", deleting that neural net file might be fairly considered murder. No, really. If you can talk to the thing and it can talk back, and it looks, talks, and acts like a human ... it's a duck. Sorry, human.

Now, we are nowhere near having that capability. We don't have to worry about that question now. But it's a very interesting question to think about, because thinking about it can grant insights into what it means for something to be sentient or human in the first place.

Scaling

[abe ferlman]

Imagine a beowulf cluster of those.