Fly connectome fails at Pong: audit exposes flaws in viral Doom and Minecraft demos
oPeraza2007 · reddit · 2026-09-10
The author stress-tested this week's viral "fly brain plays Doom/Minecraft/Beat Saber" projects (built on the 166k-neuron MaleCNS v1.0 EM connectome) with Pong's unforgiving hit/miss signal. The circuit didn't learn — and the audit is the real story:
- A neuPrint regex bug (full-match vs substring) silently zeroed two entire neuron populations.
- The original circuit had no path from photoreceptors to anything else — a whole intermediate layer was missing.
- Learning on vs off produced bit-for-bit identical results: half the four motor neurons received zero synapses from any sensory pathway, assigned to "paddle down" purely by array index coincidence.
- A rebuilt circuit refuted the biological hypothesis but surfaced a descending neuron that actually worked; eventual learning-on/off divergence was just the rule suppressing overall motor output.
Checking the viral projects: the Doom repo admits it failed its own validation gates after six iterations; the Minecraft mod admits the motion-detection pathway "stays silent" with hand-injected behaviors; the Beat Saber creator admits single-track overfitting with replay data mixed in.
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