Google Maps Fruit Fly Brain, Devs Make It Play Doom — SkimNews
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- Google and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Janelia Research Campus published on Sept. 3 the complete connectome of an adult male fruit fly's brain, mapping 166,000 neurons and 125 million synaptic connections—the largest brain map by neuron count to date.
- The decade-long project sliced the nervous system into millions of thin sections, imaged them with electron microscopy, then used AI to assemble 2D images into verified 3D neuron reconstructions.
- Software engineer Alex Wormuth began livestreaming on Sept. 6 a project that maps each Doom frame to sensory neurons and uses in-game damage to stimulate two PPL101 dopamine cells as reinforcement, attempting to teach the fly brain to play.
- Developer Jessica Paquette posted a parallel experiment running the full fly connectome to play Super Mario 64, releasing the code on GitHub and noting it was '100% vibe coded with GPT Astra.'
- Another user ran all 166,700 MaleCNS v1.0 neurons inside Minecraft to drive a simulated fly's movement, while others fine-tuned the brain to strike Y-M-C-A poses in response to tones and to react while 'watching' the Bad Apple animation.
- Google says it is already pursuing connectomes for fish and mice, since the roughly 86 billion neurons in a human brain remain 'not possible yet' to map at this resolution.
Why it matters: This is the first time a complete animal brain connectome of this scale has been released into a public, programmable format—and within 72 hours, hobbyists were running it as a video game engine. For neuroscience, the dataset gives researchers a verified wiring diagram to model how nervous systems perceive and react; for AI, it hands the field a real biological architecture to stress-test against artificial networks, rather than toy simulations.
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