A complete fly brain map went public on September 3, 2026, and within 72 hours somebody had wired it into the first-person video game Doom. The fly brain map is real, the Doom project is real, and much of what has been said about both since is not. Somewhere between the electron microscopes and the screenshots, a genuinely extraordinary piece of science acquired a set of claims it never made — that a mapped insect brain taught itself to beat a notoriously difficult video game, that it does something no language model can do. One of those claims falls apart the moment you open the repository. The other one is worth taking seriously, and it has almost nothing to do with games.

What the fly brain map actually contains

On September 3, 2026, HHMI Janelia Research Campus of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Google Research, and their collaborators released MaleCNS v1.0: a complete wiring diagram of the brain and central nervous system of an adult male Drosophila melanogaster, or common fruit fly. More than 166,000 neurons. Roughly 125 million synaptic connections. The central brain, both optic lobes, and the ventral nerve cord, which is the insect equivalent of a spinal cord. It is the largest brain map by neuron count assembled to date; it was published in Cell as a study of sexual dimorphism, and it is the result of a decade of work. Every neural shape in it was reconstructed by AI from millions of thin electron-microscope slices, then verified by human proofreaders.

…

Read the full article on Nspirement

#AI#FlyBrainMap#VideoGame