When Beane expanded the plot of Rogers and Hammerstein's Cinderella to a full Broadway play, he actually added a communist revolution subplot. One of Cinderella's stepsisters ends up marrying the revolutionary.
John Gregoriadis wired a live C. elegans connectome into the control loop of a Claude coding agent, then watched what the worm did when the code broke.
It’s C. elegans, a roundworm about a millimetre long. It has 302 neurons, and scientists mapped every single connection between them back in 1986 (the year I was born, which I’m choosing not to read anything into). It’s one of the only nervous systems we understand all the way down.
I took 14 of those neurons and ran them live in a simulation. Four of them do the heavy lifting. One is a salt sensor, and to a worm salt means food, so I wired it to reward. Its opposite I wired to bad results. One drives the worm forward, so I wired it to how much work is left. One throws it into reverse, so I wired it to errors.
I didn’t make any of that wiring up. It’s the published connectome. All I did was connect the worm’s senses to the agent’s situation and let it run.
When I was in college, I did a research fellowship one summer, and most of the researchers were doing work with C. elegans. So my professor decided to do his presentation on C. elegans too. We were in the computer science department.
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