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Comment by Palomides | Hacker News Reader

my bystander understanding: the problem is that openworm knows how the neurons are connected, but not how they're weighted and trigger each other, or how it adjusts them, and it seems like there hasn't been enough funding to take it to the next level in the past, like, 15 years

it's unclear to me how much of the result from this paper is algorithmic rather than directly founded in measured data, but it's very cool to see more work in this area.

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They claim their simulation moves in a "zigzag" pattern that's qualitatively similar to the real animal:

> During locomotion, the input of sensory neurons exhibited fluctuations due to the zigzag movement of the body’s head (Fig. 5c). The membrane potentials of each individual motor neuron also oscillated in response to the sensory input, especially the head motor neurons (Fig. 5d). The activation of muscle cells revealed traveling waves from the head to the tail (Supplementary Fig. 4), accompanied by alternating contractions and relaxations of dorsal and ventral muscle cells (Fig. 5e). These findings resemble observations in biological experiments

> They claim their simulation moves in a "zigzag" pattern that's qualitatively similar to the real animal:

It seems like they need to show it following chemical gradients the way c elegans does, I don't think any of these simulations has been successful at that.

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