Summary
A complete fruit-fly brain sim runs on a Pi 5 to play Pokémon live on Twitch.
Viewers can zap reward/punishment neurons to nudge behavior; changes last 10 minutes.
Uses FlyWire’s 139,255 neurons on a Pi; decodes game memory to buttons, with no retinotopy.
Earlier this month, Google and the Janelia Research Campus released the blueprints to a fruit fly’s brain. Researchers probably expected people to study the brain, learn about how the neurons worked, and further their interest in neuroscience, but the internet instead played Bad Apple on its neurons and stuffed several of them into The Amazing Digital Circus. You know, the things the internet tends to do with significant scientific findings.
Well, one person has taken that fruit fly and forced it to play Pokémon for the delight of Twitch. And if you want, you can hop in and help the fly make its journey toward beating the Elite Four.
You can help a fruit fly achieve its goal of becoming a Pokémon master
It’s up to you to decide if the project is either really cool or a manmade horror
Over on the Raspberry Pi subreddit, user Leetzerzz on Twitch posted a description of how their stream worked. If it’s currently live, you can watch the fruit fly move around in the video above and see everything fire off. Otherwise, here’s how Leetzerzz puts it:
All 139,255 neurons of the FlyWire FAFB v783 reconstruction — a complete adult female Drosophila brain, though not the ventral nerve cord —simulated on a Pi 5 alongside mGBA, using connections of five or more synapses.
The spatial layout of walls, doors and people is read out of the game’s memory and fed to the looming-detector populations (LPLC1, LC10, LPLC4) as left/right drive. It isn’t doing image processing — there’s no retinotopy, which is the honest limitation. Descending neuron activity decodes into button presses.
To help it along, you can pop into the Twitch stream and nudge it by giving it directions. If it’s doing well, you can stimulate its reward neurons, and it’ll do that thing more often. If it does poorly, you can fire off the punishment neurons to make it feel bad. Each neuron zap will actually modify the neural pathways, and the effects remain for 10 minutes. Just a little bit horrifying, I’d say.
If this sounds interesting, be sure to visit Leetzerzz’s Twitch stream and give the fly a nudge in the right direction.
Related
You, too, can turn your spare Raspberry Pi 5 into a Proxmox virtualization host
It’s not perfect, but it works.