A group of researchers from the U.S. and the U.K. are attempting to create the world's first digital animal by combining a robot with a digital version of a worm's brain.
The OpenWorm project involves mapping the entire physiology of the worm Caenorhabditis elegans and digitally recreating its brain and cells, according to the Daily Mail. This gives a robot the ability to mimic the actions of the organism, and it gives the scientists a way to study life on a smaller and more manageable level.
The human body was not used in this project due to being too complex for a computer to artificially design, having 100 billion neurons and 37 trillion cells. The C. elegans, however, is one of the simplest forms of life, with only 300 neurons and about 1,000 cells. Containing the same 80 percent of the same genes as a human also makes the worm a good candidate for the project.
The current version of the robot is in a very basic form. It has a brain, a stomach and bodily functions, and is able to mimic actions like moving around, running into walls and turning, but it can't perform more complex tasks like eating, the Daily Mail reported. However, the progress achieved so far helps in creating an artificial life with the ability to think for itself.
"The mere act of trying to put a working model together causes us to realize what we know and what we don't know," John Long, a roboticist and neuroscientist at Vassar College in New York State, told New Scientist.
The OpenWorm team has already run a successful kickstarter campaign for the project and plan to let people study the digital worm, called WormSim, on their computers starting next year.
