-- How the robo-worm finds its food (it also responds to touch):

Actually we used Sound sensors to activate food (chemo) sensory neurons - you can hear me whistling in the video. Once the sound gets above a certain decibel threshold, the food sensory neurons are sent a weighted value. We also used touch sensors to simulate anterior and posterior touch. After I did a specific experiment, I used to sometimes let the robot wander around my house. My wife would call the robot - activating food sensory neurons - and the robot would start to move towards her, I'm not sure who was training who at that point :-) It was very interesting to have the robot just wander for a number of minutes or an hour+. It was like a real creature wandering around interacting with it's environment. Most like a cat than any other animal.﻿

-- The researcher also wrote about plasticity and the challenges to developing connectomes (virtual brains) further, e.g. to model higher organisms:

Scaling my efforts up is a huge magnitude of effort - to the human level is beyond my vision at this time. I am looking to scale up only to the next higher order of animals and would be very happy to get to the mouse brain in my lifetime.

A couple of things that make scaling up a difficult issue:

1) C Elegans does not grow any new neurons or synapses over it's lifetime so it is a static model as far as the connectome. Plasticity is a whole new paradigm that my current model does not consider. I do have ideas for growing new synapses that I actually worked on around 8 years ago and with this research, should allow me to move forward.

2) It is hard for current computing power to handle the C Elegans nervous system with 302 neurons. The next level would be the Jelly Fish with 800 neurons. Drosophila has 100,000 neurons, and other higher order animals would be a hard problem indeed.

3) My model works on a fully mapped connectome. C Elegans is probably the only animal that has this attribute. The Allen Brain Institute is doing detailed mapping on the mouse brain so this might be a good direction. The Human Brain project is doing the human brain but they would be first to tell you it's a multi-decade endeavor.

However, there are so many benefits to this research beyond what I have accomplished. The recursiveness of the connectome that I have found is very significant; which by the way compounds the complexity of brain science 10 fold, I am also exploring the cross connections of neuron pairs to try and find patterns and distinctions. Like all good science, we take a step forward and find many new things to explore.

The OpenWorm[1] project is doing exactly what you are suggesting - trying to map the connectome to a virtual body. I encourage you to look into what they are doing in more detail.

...However, my robot-connectome is fully autonomous and this is something we rarely see in science where we give a machine a level of intelligence we cannot control so in this regard, I firmly believe that if the singularity is met, it could be caused by a guy in his garage and the "old" humanity could be doomed forever more. But this is pure speculation and we won't know until we get there but it is something to ponder and whether it's a bad thing or good, I guess depends on your point of view.

Thanks for your kind words and please continue your thoughts,
Tim﻿

[1] http://www.openworm.org/ - creating a virtual C. elegans nematode in a computer.