
Remember the OpenWorm Project that I wrote about a few years ago? It's a collaborative, open source attempt to construct an artificial life form from the cellular level to the point where it's able to have basic problem-solving abilities. This week the project (like the worm, based on the c. elegans nematode) evolved to a new milestone, when team leaders got to present their work at the Royal Society in London. Yes, the same Society whose fellows include Isaac Newton and Stephen Hawking. The meeting was organized by OpenWorm’s scientific advisor John White (father of the connectome neural map), a fellow of the Royal Society, and according to Open Worm co-founder Giovanni Idili, it was a rousing success:
“It was a two days back to back conference with loads of c. elegans modelers and experimentalists with OpenWorm talks peppered in, a meeting first of its kind with some great work presented and generating a lot of discourse between communities that historically don’t talk to each other much (biologists and computational modelers)," he tells me. "The Royal Society is gonna publish a special issue with a paper for each of the talks too.”
Specifically, this paper on virtual life will be published in a future issue of the Royal Society’s Philosophical Transactions B, whose past contributors include Benjamin Franklin, Michael Faraday, and Alan Turing. So yes, this is pretty impressive.
“Kind of a big deal for us to go from scrappy open source, open science project to hosting a meeting at the Royal Society,” as Idili puts it. “But we’re still scrappy and proudly so!” (Speaking of open source, one of Open Worm's first contributors is John Hurliman, an OpenSim pioneer.)
While I wrote “virtual life” up there, by the way, the creators are a bit more cautious around that term: