The Worm That No Computer Scientist Can Crack

The Santa Ana winds were already blowing hard erstwhile I ran the archetypal worm simulation. I’m nary hacker, but it was casual enough: Open a Terminal shell, paste immoderate commands from GitHub, ticker characters cascade down the screen. Just similar successful the movies. I was scanning the passing codification for recognizable words—neuron, synapse—when a person came to prime maine up for dinner. “One sec,” I yelled from my office. “I’m conscionable moving a worm connected my computer.”

At the Korean restaurant, the vigor was manic; the upwind was bending thenar trees astatine the waist and sending buying carts skating crossed the parking lot. The ambiance felt heightened and unreal, similar a podcast astatine treble speed. You’re doing, what, a cybercrime? my person asked. Over the din, I tried to explain: No, not a worm similar Stuxnet. A worm similar Richard Scarry.

By the clip I got location it was dark, and the archetypal sparks had already landed successful Altadena. On my laptop, waiting for maine successful a volumetric pixel box, was the worm. Pointed astatine each end, it floated successful a mist of particles, eerily stick-straight and motionless. It was, of course, not alive. Still, it looked deader than dormant to me. “Bravo,” said Stephen Larson, erstwhile I reached him aboriginal that night. “You person achieved the ‘hello world’ authorities of the simulation.”

Larson is simply a cofounder of OpenWorm, an unfastened root bundle effort that has been trying, since 2011, to physique a machine simulation of a microscopic nematode called Caenorhabditis elegans. His extremity is thing little than a integer duplicate of the existent worm, close down to the molecule. If OpenWorm tin negociate this, it would beryllium the archetypal virtual animal—and an embodiment of each our cognition not lone astir C. elegans, which is 1 of the most-studied animals successful science, but astir however brains interact with the satellite to nutrient behavior: the “holy grail,” arsenic OpenWorm puts it, of systems biology.

Unfortunately, they haven’t managed it. The simulation connected my laptop takes information culled from experiments done with surviving worms and translates it into a computational model called c302, which past drives the simulated musculature of a C. elegans worm successful a fluid dynamic environment—all successful all, a simulation of however a worm squiggles guardant successful a level sheet of goo. It takes astir 10 hours of compute clip to make 5 seconds of this behavior.

So overmuch tin hap successful 10 hours. An ember tin question connected the wind, down from the foothills and into the sleeping city. That night, connected Larson’s advice, I tweaked the clip parameters of the simulation, pushing beyond “hello world” and deeper into the worm’s uncanny valley. The adjacent morning, I woke to an eerie orangish haze, and erstwhile I pulled unfastened my laptop, bleary-eyed, 2 things made my bosom skip: Los Angeles was connected fire. And my worm had moved.

At this point, you whitethorn beryllium asking yourself a precise tenable question. Back astatine the Korean place, betwixt bites of banchan, my person had asked it too. The question is this: Uhh … why? Why, successful the look of everything our precarious greenish satellite endures, of each the problems retired determination to solve, would anyone walk 13 years trying to codification a microscopic worm into existence?