A possible indirect way of doing that is by recording the worm’s behavior:
record the behavior under many conditions
design an ANN that has the same architecture as the real worm
train many instances of the ANN on a half of the recordings
select an instance that shows the right behavior on the withheld half of the recordings
if the records are long and diverse enough, and if the ANN is realistic enough, the selected instance will have the weights that are functionally equivalent to the weights of the real worm
The same approach could be used to emulate the brain of a specific human. Although the required compute in this case might be too large to become practical in the next decades.
David believed one can develop optogenetic techniques to do this. Just added David’s full quote to the post.
With optogenetic techniques, we are just at the point where it’s not an outrageous proposal to reach for the capability to read and write to anywhere in a living C. elegans nervous system, using a high-throughput automated system. It has some pretty handy properties, like being transparent, essentially clonal, and easily transformed. It also has less handy properties, like being a cylindrical lens, being three-dimensional at all, and having minimal symmetry in its nervous system. However, I am optimistic that all these problems can be overcome by suitably clever optical and computational tricks.
Do we at least have some idea of what kind of technology would be needed for reading out connection weights?
A possible indirect way of doing that is by recording the worm’s behavior:
record the behavior under many conditions
design an ANN that has the same architecture as the real worm
train many instances of the ANN on a half of the recordings
select an instance that shows the right behavior on the withheld half of the recordings
if the records are long and diverse enough, and if the ANN is realistic enough, the selected instance will have the weights that are functionally equivalent to the weights of the real worm
The same approach could be used to emulate the brain of a specific human. Although the required compute in this case might be too large to become practical in the next decades.
David believed one can develop optogenetic techniques to do this. Just added David’s full quote to the post.