Scientists have given artificial intelligence a direct line into the nervous systems of millimeter-long worms, letting it guide the creatures to a tasty target—and demonstrating intriguing brain-AI collaboration. They trained the AI with a methodology called deep-reinforcement learning; the same is used to help AI players learn to master games such as Go. An artificial neural network, software roughly modeled on biological brains, analyzes strings of actions and outcomes, extracting strategies for an AI “agent” to interact with its environment and achieve a goal.
In the study, published in Nature Machine Intelligence, researchers trained an AI agent to direct one-millimeter-long Caenorhabditis elegans worms toward tasty patches of Escherichia coli in a four-centimeter dish. A nearby camera recorded the location and orientation of every worm’s head and body; three times per second the agent received this information for the previous 15 frames, giving it a sense of the past and present at each moment. The agent could also turn on or off a light aimed at the dish. The worms were optogenetically engineered so certain neurons would become active or inactive in response to the light, sometimes prompting movement.
More: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/scientists-make-cyborg-worms-with-a-brain-guided-by-ai/