It’s sci-fi Friday, as Google’s fully mapped fly brain, which was revealed last week, has been designed to play Doom and the rhythm action game Beat Sabre. Google’s brain mapping is a historic first and the fly brain model, which required years of work and AI help to compile, was released by the company’s research team and made available for download. A few days later, as reported by PC Gamer, this resulted in the brain being trained to play Doom. “I’m training a fly brain to play Doom using the full MaleCNS v1.0 fruit fly connectome,” announced Coinbase engineer Alex Wormuth, who also posted a live video of the simulated fly’s progress. Apparently it’s been played thousands of times and it’s still not doing very well. Not long after, another enterprising engineer, domi at Bluesky, got the brains of the fly playing the lightsaber-based rhythm action game Beat Saber. One video shows a small fly model waving lightsabers and slicing through advancing tiles, probably better than I would do. The same modder made the fly’s brain play shooters, using the fly’s brain to determine when to turn, apparently, and its “courtship song” to know when to shoot. “The more excited the fly is, the harder it tries to shoot,” Domi observed alarmingly. Google had already successfully mapped the brain of an adult female fruit fly, but this time it is the brain of a male fruit fly that has been mapped and, as Google pointed out, there is a notable difference. “It’s a big step in advancing neuroscience experiments,” Google said, perhaps imagining it running in Doom, “and promises to be a critical resource for neuroscience for years to come.”
