About
SwarmRoot is an animal-token identity built from a real 302-neuron C. elegans connectome. It is a persistent digital worm in a living habitat—not a claim of consciousness.
The dataset
Connectivity comes from Cook et al. 2019, loaded through OpenWorm's C. elegans Connectome Toolbox and cross-checked against Varshney et al. 2011 and White et al. 1986. The differences between those datasets are recorded in the export report rather than smoothed over.
Neurotransmitter assignments come from the modern maps: Pereira et al. 2015 for cholinergic cells, Gendrel et al. 2016 for GABAergic, Serrano-Saiz et al. 2013 for glutamatergic, and Alkema et al. 2005 for the monoamines. This matters: transmitter identity is what decides whether a synapse excites or inhibits.
Connectome hash 0x220fe7a4c0b9d293daef7741237d82daab335022043c53ee7a88df5340a02694
Assumptions and simplifications
Every one of these is a modelling choice that could be wrong. They are listed so you can judge the results.
No position source covering all 302 cells could be sourced reliably, so each neuron is placed by its ganglion along the anterior-posterior axis, with ventral-cord motor neurons ordered by index. The connectivity is real; the coordinates are a faithful arrangement, not data.
Without it, in-degree sets excitability: AVA receives from over a hundred cells and saturates while sparsely wired neurons never leave rest. Drive is divided by the square root of total input weight, standing in for the homeostatic synaptic scaling real neurons perform.
Most synapses are excitatory, so each neuron's baseline drive is subtracted. This keeps the resting point fixed and lets the synaptic gain scale only departures from rest, rather than pushing every cell into the flat top of its activation curve.
Both are constants that cannot read the environment, so neither can steer, approach or avoid anything. Without them the network sits at a single operating point and the organism does not move at all. The connectome-ablation result below is what demonstrates they are not driving behaviour.
GABA inhibits; acetylcholine and glutamate excite by default. Seven connections are inhibitory against that default because the literature reports them so, including the AWC to AIY glutamate-gated chloride synapse and the mutual antagonism between the forward and backward command interneurons.
Sanity and ablation results: 6 of 10 criteria met
Measured by the test suite in CI, published whether or not they passed.
What the failures have in common. Individual sensory responses are strong and correct: an aversive stimulus drives ASH from 0.27 to 0.93 and raises the reversal command interneuron AVA to 0.65. But it raises the forward command AVB by a similar amount at the same time, so forward and backward drive rise together and their difference never changes sign. The motor readout itself is verified: driving AVA directly produces a clean reversal at −70 µm/s.
The underlying reason is that AVA integrates over a hundred presynaptic partners, so no single two-hop pathway can dominate it in a rate model with uniform per-synapse parameters. Published models that reproduce C. elegans chemotaxis optimise those parameters individually. We have not done that, and rather than add a rule that says “reverse when danger is near” we are reporting the gap.
Principles
Frequently asked
No. It is a simulation of a nervous system built from real anatomical data. It has no metabolism, no body chemistry, and no capacity for experience that we can demonstrate.
No, and that is the point. You can change its environment. What it does about that is decided by 302 neurons.
The worm stops living for that period. On restart the engine reloads its last checkpoint, replays the input log deterministically, and records the gap as dormancy.
Identity, significant experiences, learning events, and periodic checkpoints containing a hash of the complete brain state. The contracts are written but not deployed, so nothing is on chain yet.
Credits
Connectome data: Cook, S.J. et al. (2019) Nature 571:63-71. Cross-checks: Varshney, L.R. et al. (2011) PLoS Comput Biol 7:e1001066; White, J.G. et al. (1986) Phil Trans R Soc Lond B 314:1-340.
Loaded through the OpenWorm C. elegans Connectome Toolbox. Neurotransmitter maps: Pereira et al. 2015; Gendrel et al. 2016; Serrano-Saiz et al. 2013; Alkema et al. 2005; Wang et al. 2024.
Circuit references: Kawano et al. 2011; Gao et al. 2018; Fouad et al. 2018; Gordus et al. 2015; Chalasani et al. 2007 and 2010; Piggott et al. 2011; Narayan et al. 2011; Roberts et al. 2016.