The OpenWorm Kickstarter campaign has the origin of artificial intelligence.
Stephen Larson is a cofounder of the OpenWorm project and he found inspiration for the project in a place that is familiar to almost every engineer – Star Trek. If Commander Data was the artificial intelligence of the future, why was there no counterpart in the early 2000s?
His answer to the problem was to think small. Worms are a simple organism made up of just one thousand cells, have been studied by three Nobel Prize winners, and have a quality that straddles the line between creepy and fascinating.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/openworm/openworm-a-digital-organism-in-your-browser
The project’s goal is to create an interactive version of the Caenorhabditis elegans, a transparent nematode about one millimeter in length. An interactive version of the worm will be created based on its physical biology. A great line from the Kickstarter video is that the developers want to create Sim City or Google Earth, but for worms.
Backers will each get their own WormSim, that will interact with the latest OpenWorm model. Users will be able to see the worm and click on different parts of the worm to explore its muscles and systems.
All of the Kickstarter funding will go toward the model development. First the skin and muscles, then the nervous system, then the organs and finally the holistic body will be modeled.
C elegans is studied by more scientists and students every year to understand biology and the human condition. This open source database will allow all users to access the worm data and understand what is happening. As a first stab at developing a new phase of artificial intelligence, this is amazing.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/openworm/openworm-a-digital-organism-in-your-browser