Google’s fruit fly brain map was turned into a Doom test and later a Bitcoin trading bot

Google Research and its partners spent about a decade building MaleCNS v1.0, a full wiring diagram of a male fruit fly’s central nervous system. Announced on Sept. 3, the dataset was described by Google as the brain map with the largest number of neurons ever assembled. It includes 166,691 neurons, about 125 million synaptic connections, and more than 11,700 cell types, while also linking the brain and ventral nerve cord in a single map. Within three days of its release, Coinbase software engineer Alex Wormuth said he was using the full connectome to train a fly brain to play Doom. His open-source project, DOOMFLY, converts each game frame into brightness and color signals, routes them through a simplified neural dynamics system based on the released connectome, and maps neural activity to in-game controls. The project README says the system is still in live training and has not shown that it can survive in the game. Wormuth later adapted the same brain map into Stonkfly, an open-source project that reads candlestick charts and places Bitcoin trades through a Coinbase account. The report also said other developers connected the dataset to Super Mario 64, Beat Saber, and Minecraft within a week of the public release.