A worm's whole nervous system, live in a dish.
C. elegans was the first animal to have every neuron and connection mapped. Vermi runs all 302 of its neurons, wired as published, inside a simulated body. Buys of $VERMI drop food. Sells drop something bitter. Everyone watches the same worm.
The market is its weather.
Trades of $VERMI become things in the dish. What the worm does next is up to its neurons.
Food lands at the edge
A patch of bacteria appears somewhere near the rim. A bigger buy makes a bigger meal. Its smell spreads through the agar.
Something bitter, close by
A bitter drop lands near its head. If it reaches the nose, the pain neuron ASH fires and the worm backs away.
Hunger, then searching
With no food for a while it gets hungry. Its turning neurons get more input and it starts to search the dish.
It remembers, and it feels the weather.
Three faint smells sit in the dish. What lands near them, and how jumpy the price is, changes how it behaves for hours.
Smells take on meaning
Food near a smell makes it seek that smell. Bitter near one makes it avoid it. The memory fades over hours unless it happens again.
Price swings heat the dish
A jumpy market warms one side. Its temperature neuron AFD steers it back toward the 20 °C it likes. Calm markets, calm dish.
Holders raise their own
Hatch a worm with the same wiring and its own small quirks. Watch it in your browser and race it every week.
Every dot is one neuron, live.
Smell, touch and taste neurons feed interneurons, which decide forward or back, which drive the motor neurons, which pull on 95 muscles. No movement is pre-recorded. When it reacts, you can trace the path.
What it just did, in plain words.
Every line comes from real events in the simulation: which neuron fired, which way it turned, how long it took.
Waiting for the first events from the dish.
Run the classic experiments yourself.
Switch off AVB
Forward crawling fails; the animal mostly backs up or stalls.
Chalfie et al. 1985, J Neurosci 5:956Switch offSwitch off AWC
Much weaker chemotaxis toward food smells.
Bargmann, Hartwieg & Horvitz 1993, Cell 74:515Switch offSwitch off ASH
The animal no longer backs away from bitter.
Hilliard et al. 2005, EMBO J 24:63; Bargmann, Thomas & Horvitz 1990Real wiring. A model, not a copy.
The connections are the published ones. The neuron model and the body are simplified, and the Science page says exactly how.
- WiringCook et al. 2019, Nature. Whole-animal connectome of the hermaphrodite, via OpenWorm (MIT licence).
- NeuronsGraded-potential model with gap junctions and synapses, after Wicks et al. 1996 and Kunert et al. 2014.
- BodyResistive force theory on a gel surface; the undulation comes from motor neurons sensing body bends (Wen et al. 2012).
- BehaviourTurns and runs from the AWC, AIY and AIB circuit (Chalasani 2007, Gray 2005).