Digital fruit fly brain with 166,000 neurons goes viral playing Minecraft and trading bitcoin
404 Media · rss · 2026-09-15
HHMI Janelia and Google Research released MaleCNS v1.0, the first complete connectome of an adult male fruit fly central nervous system, mapping over 166,000 neurons across the brain, optic lobes and ventral nerve cord — and the internet went wild with it.
- Georgia Tech grad student Evan Sinclair Smith ran all 166,700 neurons inside Minecraft to drive a fly's movement, racking up millions of views in a day.
- Modders have since had it trade bitcoin ("stonkfly"), write LinkedIn posts, play Doom and Beat Saber, and even prefer male partners ("bi fly").
- Nico Christie and Peter Wang identified neuron groups (hΔH, hΔA, hΔI, hΔG) enabling navigation via fast synaptic weight updates — a fast-weight continual learning mechanism current LLMs lack.
The authors stress it's only a digital wiring map with no sentience. Scientifically, having both male and female connectomes enables the first synaptic-resolution cross-sex comparison, and researchers hope such work paves the way toward full human brain connectomes (86 billion neurons) for tackling disorders like Alzheimer's.
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