There is a much discussed idea that proposes that the human brain will one day be replicated in a computer. This artificial intelligence can then be placed inside a robot body to create synthetic life that mirrors humanity, but in a much more durable form.

Renowned scientist Stephen Hawking and Google engineer Ray Kurzweil believe that human immortality will be achieved by uploading the minds of living humans into computers and then downloading them into robots. In 2013 in a speech at the Global Futures 2045 International Congress in New York Kurzweil said that this technology is 30 years away.

The idea has been met with some skepticism and we are certainly not there yet, however a team of researchers has taken a very tiny step in that direction by placing the artificially constructed mind of a roundworm into a simple robotic body made of Lego bricks.

OpenWorm is, according the projects website “an open source project dedicated to creating the world’s first virtual organism in a computer, a C.elegans nematode.”

A C.elegans or Caenorhabditis elegans nematode is a non-parasitic roundworm or about 1 mm in length.

Recently, OpenWorm made a significant breakthrough when their roundworm mimicking software caused a robot to act independently, entirely on its own.

Creating robots that follow pre-programmed instructions is nothing new, every robot ever created, dating back to a steam powered bird in 400 BCE, has done that. Until now, however, no robot has acted completely on its own.

So far the robot has not completely mimicked the C.elegant. It has, however, begun to replicate simple behaviors such as approaching objects to investigate them and then backing away. According to OpenWorm researchers the worm-bot may soon be looking for a mate and avoiding perceived predators.

“We know we have the correct number of neurons, we have them connected together in roughly the same way that the animal has, and they’re organized in the same way in that there are some neurons that give out information and other neurons that receive information. We feel we’ve gone a long way down the road, but we still know that there’s a lot that’s been left out and there are a lot of assumptions — at the moment it represents one point in a line of iterative improvements,” project coordinator Stephen Larson told UPI.

Larson believes that the work is 20 to 30 percent complete and it is still awaiting peer review. However there is still great excitement for the project and the progress that has been made.

“We definitely have further to go, but I think what captures people’s imagination is how much information we have managed to put together. We know we have the correct number of neurons, we have them connected together in roughly the same way that the animal has, and they’re organized in the same way in that there are some neurons that give out information and other neurons that receive information,“ Larson recently told CNN.

“We’ve been working on it for four years and while we have a lot more to achieve it’s been the most surprising project I’ve been involved in,” he added.

The success or failure of this project could have a dramatic impact on the perception of ideas like Kurzweil’s. The roundworm is one of the simplest multi-cellular life forms and if it can’t be replicated the chance of replicating something as complicated as a human brain are slim.

“It’s really a difficult thing to say whether it’s possible. I’m optimistic that if we’re starting with 302 neurons and 10,000 synapses we’ll be able to understand its behavior from a modeling perspective,” Yale graduate student and OpenWorm contributor Steven Cook told The Atlantic in 2013.

The human brain, by comparison, has approximately 86 billion neurons and untold hundreds of billions of synapses, with millions of new pathways being formed every minute of every day.

Individuals interested in the OpenWorm project can follow it’s progress, download the source code and the OpenWorm iPhone app and find a variety of ways to get involved through web site Openworm.org.