heeeelllp meee
A couple of weeks ago, scientists announced they had made a complete map of a male fruitfly brain (they’d already done a female fruitfly brain). They call it a connectome.
How did they do it? you ask. I’m glad you asked.
They used a microtome and sliced the tiny brain up very fine and then scanned the slices and put it together again by computer. They had to use an AI to fill in the missing bits – no matter how carefully you slice, something will be lost.
It’s absolutely worth clicking the link, then clicking the picture, then clicking it again to get the enlarged view. It’s wild. I wish it was the sort of online model you could move around in real time.
The brain has 166,700 retained cells and 25,582,938 connections, so naturally someone taught it to play Doom. “Doom frames are converted into sensory inputs, passed through the simulated MaleCNS v1.0 wiring, and that selected neurons are mapped to the game’s turn/move/fire controls.”
It is, by the way, a truly terrible Doom player. I haven’t seen it make a single kill. It must be a very rough approximation of what a fruitfly’s brain actually does, though, because I imagine a fly’s spatial sense is really quite good.
The sharp-eyed will have noticed the chatgpt in the URL of Doomfly (fly-brain-doom.awormuth.chatgpt.site). I asked ChatGPT about it and it said the site was hosted by an Open-AI server, but not actually ChatGPT. The unmodified AI itself cannot play Doom.
And then it posted a laughing emoji, which is just weird.
Posted: September 14th, 2026 under personal.
Comments: 1
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Comment from Uncle AL
Time: September 14, 2026, 7:18 pm
The essential question, deeply existential. Is this: IS THE BRAIN HAVING FUN?
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