Connectomic AI

One of the surprising revelations that I discovered while preforming emulations of animal connectomes is the huge amount of recurrence. The brain literally folds back on itself over and over again.  To illustrate this idea, let's look at C elegans again. Keep in mind that we are working with 302 neurons. Neurons connect to a set of other neurons. This connected set has a number of axons that link back to the originating neuron. If we look at the Interneuron AVAL, AVAL connects to 77 other neurons. These 77 neurons connect to another set of neurons, so on and so on. Each neuron can have multiple connections to other neurons. For example, AVAL has 11 synaptic connections to the neuron DA6. From the first set of neurons that AVAL connects too, there are 83 total synaptic and gap junction connections from those 77 neurons back to AVAL. If we take those 77 neurons and follow what neurons they connect too, we find from that second set (Layer 2), there are 573 neuronal connections back to...

Caenorhabditis elegans (C elegans) Hermaphrodite Wild Type has a fully mapped connectome of 302 Neurons. C elegans is the most studied animal on earth. The connections and connection types (Chemical and Electrical), and the function of each neuron is well known (Sensory, Interneuron and Motor Neurons) Nervous systems are messy, noisy systems, each neuron works independently of one another, and I wanted to recreate that system as close as possible. We have this vision that neurons are nice, neat tubes but in reality, they are like a play-doh snake someone has smashed and squished. I created a single program that can assume the identity of each of the 302 neurons that make up the C elegans connectome. Each of the 302 individual programs message to the other programs via User Datagram Protocol (UDP). UDP is like TCP but doesn’t care about packet loss. UDP is how most video and audio is transmitted over the internet.  To simulate connections, I used the number of connections as a weigh...