Developers Build Games and Bots From Google's Fruit Fly Brain Map

Google DeepMind and HHMI Janelia released a structural wiring diagram of a male fruit fly's brain, mapping more than 166,000 neurons. Developers have since used the connectome to build experimental software: a Doom player, a Beat Saber agent trained with reinforcement learning, a Bitcoin trading system called Stonkfly, controllers for Mario, Smash Bros, Minecraft, and a racing drone. A project called FetterFly uses a frontier AI model alongside the connectome to control a rendered character in Three.js environments, with an open-source release approaching. A separate project published a fly-language model (FLM) that attempts to use the connectome as the basis for a novel AI architecture. Developers must manually define what signals represent sensory input and what neural outputs mean as actions; the connectome is a structural diagram, not a working digital mind.