C. Elegens var. "Robotus"

 

C elegens has a total of 929 cells in it body of which 30 are sensory neurons that respond to mechanical stimuli and 90 are motor cells that produce body motion in response to the mechanical stimuli. 

All 929 cells are interconnected in a network and all the other cells in the body for enabling all various functions required for life. The interconnectivity of the entire network has been is know and has been mapped.

A subset of this network is the network of 30 sensory neurons that respond to mechanical stimuli and the 90 are motor cells that produce body motion in response to the mechanical stimuli. , the interconnectivity of the entire network has been is know and has been napped.

So it was that a project was initiated to build a robot using the network of sensors responding to the same mechanical stimuli as C. elegens and producing the same movements in response to them. That robot is shown above. 

In the robot electro-mechanical transducer replace biological sensory cells, electric motors replace biological muscle cells and User Datagram Protocol (UDP) replaces interconnecting cells for communications between sensors and actuators (muscle cells/electric motor) to ensure the sensory data from each sensory cell is ultimately communicated to the correct actuator cells. (The UDP is the same as that used by the Internet to transfer information between the billions of individual sending and receiving devices connected to it.) In this way, the worm and the robot are "hardwired" in exactly the same way to function in exactly the same way the same in the environment.

The robot, like the biological worm or, indeed, us humans, is not preprogrammed to perform any specific function in any specific way except as dictated by the environment surrounding them. Both are entirely  nothing more than sensors connected to actuator in a fixed network arrangement. Both gather the sensory data in the same way, process the data the same way and use it cause the actuators to respond in the same way. That is, they both worm and robot THINK by exactly the same process. And the only difference process of thinking between robots and C.elegens and us humans is that the neural network of us humans has evolved to become many magnitudes larger in size and complexity with most of the thinking process occurring in the centralized neurons in our brain. 

PS: To see the robot in action go to https://openworm.org/