Santa Ana The winds were already blowing demanding when I was conducting the first worm simulation. I am not a hacker, but it was straightforward enough: open the terminal bullet, paste a few commands from GitHub, watch cascade characters on the screen. Just like in movies. I scanned the passing code in search of recognizable words –neuronIN synapse– When a friend came to me for dinner. “One Sec”, I shouted from my office. “I just run a worm on my computer.”
In the Korean restaurant, Energia was manic; The wind died palm trees at the waist and sent baskets in ice skating through the parking lot. The atmosphere was increased and unreal, like a double speed podcast. Do you do what, cybercrime? My friend asked. Later I tried to explain: No, not a worm like Stuxnet. A worm like Richard Scarry.
Before I returned home, it was obscure, and the first sparks already landed in Altadena. On my laptop, waiting for me in a volume pixel box, he was a worm. Indicated at each end, he floated in the mist of particles, incredibly striped and still. Of course, it wasn’t alive. Still, it looked more dead than dead. “Bravo,” said Stephen Larson as I reached him later that night. “You achieved the state of simulation” Hello World “.
Larson is a co -founder OpenWORMOpen Source software effort, which has been trying to build a computer simulation of microscopic nematode since 2011 Caenorhabditis elegans. His goal is a real twin of a real worm, accurate to the molecule. If OpenWorm can manage it, it would be the first virtual animal – and the embodiment of all our knowledge not only about C. elegansWhich is one of the most studied animals in science, but about how the brains interactions with the world in order to create behavior: “Holy Grail”, as OpenWorm put it, the biology of systems.
Unfortunately, they failed. The simulation on my laptop takes data from experiments made with live worms and translates it into a computing frame called C302, which then drives simulated musculature a C. elegans A worm in a liquid dynamic environment – in total a simulation of how the worm has ahead in the flat plate of Mazka. The generation of five seconds of this behavior takes about 10 hours of computing time.
So much can happen in 10 hours. Ember can travel in the wind, from the foot to the sleeping city. That night, on the advice of Larson, I improved the simulation time parameters, pushing “Hello World” and deeper into the amazing valley of Robak. The next morning I woke up with an amazing orange mist, and when I opened a laptop, giant, two things made my heart skip: Los Angeles was burning. And my worm moved.
At this point You can ask yourself a very reasonable question. After returning in a Korean place, between Banchan’s bite, my friend also asked about it. The question is: Uhh … Why? Why, in the face of everything that lasts our uncertain green world, from all the problems that can be solved, would someone spend 13 years trying to encode a microscopic worm?