The worm that the world cannot crack

Santa Anna The winds were blowing hard when I opened the first mantle simulation. I am not a pirate, but it was easy enough: open a terminal, paste some commands from GitHub, see letters accommodate on the screen. Just as in movies. I was doing the passcode for well -known words –Nerve cellsand Clamp– When a friend came to take me for dinner. “One second”, I shouted from my office. “I’m just running a worm on my computer.”

In the Korean restaurant, the energy was obsessive. The wind was bending palm trees at the waist and sending shopping carts that ski through the parking lot. The air is very and unrealistic, such as dual podcasts. You are doing, what, Internet crimes? My friend asked. Above religion, I tried to explain: No, not a worm like Stuxnet. A worm like Richard Scarri.

By the time when I arrived at home, it was dark, and the first spark has already fell Tadina. On my laptop, waiting for me in a volumetric pixel box, the worm was. He pointed each end, floating in fog of molecules, respectively, respectively, without movement. It was, of course, not alive. However, it seemed deadly from the dead for me. “Bravo”, Stephen Larson said, when it later arrived in that night. “Hello World.”

Larson founder Open wormAn open source software that has been trying, since 2011, to create a computer simulation for a microscopic microscopic Caenorhabditis Elegans. Its goal is not less than the digital twin of real worms, accurately to the molecule. If OpenWorm is able to manage this, this will be the first virtual animal – and the embodiment of all our knowledge is not only C. ElegansIt is one of the most studied animals in science, but on how minds interact with the world to produce behavior: “Holy Just”, as the open worm is offered to the biology of systems.

Unfortunately, they did not manage it. Take simulation on my laptop data transferred from experiments that were conducted with live worms and translated into a mathematical frame called C302, which then pays the simulation muscles to A. C. Elegans Worm in a dynamic fluid environment – all in all, simulating how the worm screams forward in a GOO flat dish. It takes about 10 hours from an account time to generate five seconds of this behavior.

A lot can happen in 10 hours. Ember can travel on the wind, down from the hills and to the city of sleep. That night, based on Larson’s advice, you modified the simulation time parameters, and exceeded “Hello World” and deeper in the UNCANNY valley in the worm. The next morning, I woke up to a strange orange fog, and when I pulled my laptop and eyes, my heart was skipped: Los Angeles was burning. A worm has moved.

at this point, You may ask yourself a very reasonable question. Returning to the Korean place, between Panchhan’s bites, my friend also asked that. The question is: Uh … why? Why, in the face of everything, our green, risky world lasts, for all the problems that must be solved, does anyone spend 13 years in an attempt to cure a microscopic worm into existence?