The first manifestation of digital "life"

The digitized brain of a primitive creature controlling the movements of a robot

DailyTechInfo by MailOnline:
Are we on the brink of creating artificial life? Scientists digitise the brain of a WORM and place it inside a robotThe human body, which has about 37 trillion cells and 100 billion neurons, is too complex an object for even the most powerful of the most powerful supercomputers to date to "pull" its mathematical model.

But very accurate models of the most primitive living organisms are simple enough to be "in the teeth" and ordinary desktop computers. This is very clearly demonstrated by a project called OpenWorm, in which a functioning mathematical model of the C. elegans worm has been created, which can be called the world's first digital living organism.

The organism of the worm Caenorhabditis elegans consists of about 1000 cells, and there are about 300 neurons in its nervous system. Despite this simplicity, C.elegans cells contain genes that are 80 percent the same as human genes, and the worm's body can be considered as a simpler version of more complex forms of modern life.

The mathematical model of this worm, created by the joint efforts of scientists from the USA, Great Britain and some other countries, can already be downloaded and run on any person's computer.

But recently, scientists have taken the next step: they took from the general mathematical model of OpenWorm (above) the part that is the model of the worm's brain, and placed this model in the microprocessor that controls the robot's movements (below).

Having at its disposal a "brain" of 302 digital neurons that function exactly imitating ordinary living neurons, the robot assembled from the Lego Mindstorms EV3 constructor was able to act like a primitive living organism. When encountering obstacles, the robot can pull back, turn around and move in other directions. And this is not done as a result of processing instructions such as "if there is a collision with an obstacle, then you have to do ... ...", robot servos are controlled by signals generated by digital neurons, so that the robot's behavior is very similar to the behavior of an earthworm enclosed in a box.

"Our attempt to put a working mathematical model of a primitive brain into a robot allows us to understand what we don't know yet and can't learn in any other way," says John Long, a specialist in robotics and neuroscience from Vassar College in New York.

So far, the robot's digital brain and its actions are extremely and extremely primitive. The robot cannot yet perform higher-order functions, such as moving in search of food. Nevertheless, all this is a big enough step towards the creation of completely artificial life forms, cybernetic organisms that will perform dangerous work for and instead of people and conduct research on other planets and cosmic bodies.

Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru08.12.2014