There's been a mini-milestone in the OpenWorm Project that I wrote about last Summer, which is the collaborative, open source attempt to construct an artificial life form from the cellular level to the point where it's able to have basic problem-solving abilities. Watch the video closely below:

"That's a simulated worm body with muscle segments that resemble an actual C.Elegans," project advocate John Hurliman tells me. "Each muscle segment can receive a contraction signal, and although the current setup just has a hardcoded algorithm driving the muscles, its movement closely resembles published literature on how C. Elegans swims." In other words - they've artificially recreated internal muscle sensation, a building block for movement, entirely through code.

That's seriously cool, but so is what will follow: "Next steps are to continue working on performance (this is one-third of a second which took 72 hours to compute) and hook up a synthetic brain to it."

By the way, if you're curious about the algorithm that drives the musculature, and how accurately it simulates the real thing, there's hardcore geek details from Mr. Hurliman below: