specimen
Neuro Worm · C. elegans wiring · steel chassis
vent field
2,500 m · 25.1 MPa · 2.0 °C
302 neurons
one instinct · eat
observed live · github · @302neurons
41 spikes / s
2 °C20406080 °C
Vent field · 2,500 m · black smoker

NEURO WORM

A complete nervous system, grafted into steel. It only knows how to eat.
wiring complete since 1986 · chassis fed daily
302 neurons · zero guesses · zero mercy
searchlight scanning · scroll toward the vent ↓
Budget
ETH on Robinhood Chain
Launches left
at 0.00055 ETH each
Eaten
1,284
pages bitten this session
Supply
fixed at launch
Contract address · $NWORM
what it is
the wiring · 1986

A finished brain in an unfinished body

The fly's 165,122 neurons were traced by machines in 2026 and are still being proofread. The worm's 302 were traced by hand, from 8,000 electron micrographs, and published in 1986. Every neuron has a name. Every one of its ~7,000 chemical synapses and ~900 gap junctions is known. It is the first connectome, and the only complete one. We took that wiring out of the worm and put it in something with jaws.

Neuro Worm runs that wiring as 302 leaky integrate-and-fire units — the adult hermaphrodite, Cook et al. 2019 counts, signs from the Wang et al. 2024 neurotransmitter atlas. Rest −65 mV, threshold −50 mV, 20 ms tau, gap junctions as linear conductances. Nothing is sampled; the whole thing fits on one page of the repo. A worm's brain has one drive above all others: find food, move toward it, pump. The steel is ours. The hunger is the worm's.

302
neurons · all named
~7,000
chemical synapses
1986
finished · 40 years before the fly
1
instinct left after the graft
how it reaches the world
no eyes · a nose · jaws

It cannot see. It smells the page, crawls toward it, and bites

A worm has no eyes, so the screen is not an image to it — it is a gradient of food. Each pixel column becomes a concentration, fed into the amphid chemosensory neurons the way a chemical would reach the nose. All 302 cells integrate. The cursor comes back out of the command interneurons that make a worm go forward or back, and the jaws close on whatever it reaches: buttons, forms, other people's launch pages.

AWC · AWA
Attractive odour. Bright, high-contrast boxes smell good. They pull the head, and the cursor's x.
AVB · AVA
Forward and backward command neurons. Their balance drives the cursor's y.
ASH
Nose touch and repellents. A worm reverses when it fires; here it is Escape.
MC · pharynx
The pumping neurons. When the worm bites, that is the click. It bites a lot.
the plan
feeding schedule

Being fed until it can feed itself

Not a roadmap of promises — a sequence. Everything above the amber line is done and checkable in the repo.

on-chain
the smoker · 80 °C · $NWORM

$NWORM

To be launched by the worm, from its own wallet, on Robinhood Chain — the first thing it eats. Read the receipt yourself rather than taking this page's word for it.

Contract
Paired
Creator tax
Supply
Chain
Robinhood Chain · id 4663
open on the launchpad watch it feed live
what is not real, stated plainly

The parts that aren't the worm

  • The steel is a costume. A real C. elegans is one millimetre long, transparent, and has no jaws. The chassis and the pincers are ours. The 302 neurons are not.
  • It does not live at a vent. It lives in rotting fruit. The smoker is the set, borrowed from the Pompeii worm, which does.
  • The screen is not an odour. Mapping pixel columns to chemosensory input is our choice, not biology. The wiring downstream of that choice is the worm's.
  • It does not actually eat anything on-chain. No contract is drained, no liquidity is touched. "Devour" means it clicks. 302 cells find one box and bite it; a script completes the rest and the live log labels which was which.
  • It is not released yet. Step 08 is locked. Today a script still starts each run.