I remember reading about OpenWorm a few years ago and thinking it was ridiculously cool. I'm glad to see the project has persisted. They do a bad job, however, of selling themselves.<p>1. What have they accomplished to date? I see little more than an animated worm. Tell me about how you're trying to model the worm, and how these approaches may accurately capture its behavior.<p>2. Why should I care about having an animated worm in my browser? Why is this an appropriate medium to deliver the simulation? If I want to do any kind of science, how will this help me? What I've seen to date looks scarcely more useful than Bonzi Buddy. The most interesting part seems the Academy, but I must donate at least $250 to gain access. This seems counter to the "open" part of "OpenWorm."<p>3. What academic affiliations does the project have? If the project is useful and has experienced success to date, surely they can recruit students/postdocs/whatever to work on it full-time, with well-established labs making major contributions. Are they computational people? Biology people?<p>4. What are the bona fides of the people involved? If they can't typeset or capitalize the species' name properly ("C. Elegans") in their video, that doesn't lend much faith to their expertise. The gentleman in the video marvels over the mere "1000 cells" in the worm, but does nothing to put this number in context (with, say, the 10 trillion cells of humans).<p>I'd love to see this project succeed, and I admire its attempt to recruit funding through a novel means, but the pricing seems too steep, and the overall quality of the pitch is regrettably poor.
This project is huge. I'm glad to see it has come this far. It's the first ever simulation of a multi-cellular organism at a really useful detail, presented and made available to the masses.<p>It's work like this that is going to help explode the use of citizen scientist work. Imagine being able to run your own experiments on a simulation first without having to buy and breed your own worms. So many more experiments can be carried out, and in parallel too.<p>It's not an exact model yet, but it's getting closer. The end goal is to get the model to the point where if you run an experiment on the virtual worm, you can be certain you'll get the same results on the real worm.
I will definitely be donating. I met Stephen about a year and a half ago when this was just getting off the ground and he was (and still is) incredibly enthusiastic about going after such a challenging problem. When I mentioned that we had had relatively little success building such complex models he pointed me to the work modelling Mycoplasma genitalium [1]. The problem is not that we don't have the mathematical or computational tools or even the data to do it, it is that the social and practical aspects of organizing and integrating such a major engineering project are usually only available at companies with massive amounts of capital. Serious attempts to completely model complex systems are also usually beyond the scope of the least publishable unit. Hopefully open science will be able to bridge the gap. Good luck to the whole OW team!<p>[1] <a href="http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0092867412007763" rel="nofollow">http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0092867412...</a>
On a lighter note there is always 'Triop World':<p><a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Interplay-UK-5026175001302-Triop-World/dp/B00008OS3U" rel="nofollow">http://www.amazon.co.uk/Interplay-UK-5026175001302-Triop-Wor...</a><p>The aim is you grow worms and see what happens. Here is the 'must read' review:<p><i>Is it possible to become emotionally attached to a kill-crazy cannibalistic worm that looks like a facehugger from the Alien movies and spends most of its time attempting to eat its siblings?</i><p><i>Having recently shed a tear while burying my last one - Chompy - in the back garden, I'd say yes. These little beasties inspired fear and disgust in my girlfriend, but to me they were true friends.</i><p><i>How could I forget the way Chompy used to play with his smaller brothers, chasing them around their tank for hours on end? Every couple of days, one of the brothers would vanish completely, and Chompy would do an extra-long poo to show how much he missed them.</i><p><i>After about 30 days, Chompy disposed of the final, equally large brother - Ripley - by eating him from the tail up. I caught the two of them playing on the bottom of the tank - Chompy had Ripley's face in his mouth, and was munching away without a care in the world. The rest of Ripley was nowhere to be seen.</i><p><i>Heartbroken, Chompy only lasted another week after that. For a while, he ate his fish pellets and bits of carrot as normal, but a triops is only half a triops without his playmates. Eventually Chompy turned green, and the end was nigh.</i><p><i>Would I repeat the experience? Maybe, but next time I would have to steel myself for the inevitable tragic end. Triops might not live long, but they've got personality. And they eat Sea Monkeys for breakfast.</i><p>So, if this open source 'digital organism' can evolve to be as cool as Chompy then there could be quite some appeal.
Here is the current browser based version:<p><a href="http://browser.openworm.org/" rel="nofollow">http://browser.openworm.org/</a><p><a href="http://caltech.wormbase.org/virtualworm/" rel="nofollow">http://caltech.wormbase.org/virtualworm/</a><p>Human version (much cooler): <a href="http://www.zygotebody.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.zygotebody.com/</a><p>Cow version: <a href="http://open-3d-viewer.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/web/index.html" rel="nofollow">http://open-3d-viewer.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/web/index.htm...</a><p>Source code for the viewer for all of these: <a href="https://code.google.com/p/open-3d-viewer/" rel="nofollow">https://code.google.com/p/open-3d-viewer/</a><p>Note: you're going to want to use hardware acceleration for these, otherwise they'll be very slow.
Worm Tangent: If you have children and enjoy gardening you should look into setting up a worm compost bin in your basement. I do not have kids but a lot of the kids in the neighborhood enjoy looking at the worms in the compost bin and seeing how they move up a new layer once they have eaten all of the food in the bottom layer. The biggest hit with the kids is the moving pink brillo pad that is pile of baby worms. When I got the worm farm setup my only goal was cheaper food for my roses. The worm casing/compost is great for my roses and the neighborhood diplomacy is a great side benefit.
Strange use of the word "open" and whilst this project is very interesting, I don't think people want to pay to play with a worm in their browser.
It would be much more exciting if they could get a SINGLE cell (of whichever organism) simulated with virtual subatomic particles. Has anything like that been attempted? Do we even have the data?
As much as I understood, this project isn't so much about AI, as it is about a better understanding of biology.<p>I don't know if the project still lives, or are there other many such works, but Polyworld seemed like an interesting idea (developing AI through evolution): <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_m97_kL4ox0" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_m97_kL4ox0</a>
They call it "open", then turn around and charge ~$50 to access the web-browser version of the sim for a year? Doesn't feel very open to me.<p>I recognize just how important C. elegans is to neural/bio research, and how ambitious the project probably is. I just think this would be so much cooler if they were offering it to all curious minds free of charge.