Google Mapped A Fruit Fly Brain, So Engineers Taught It To Play Doom
When Google released a complete 3D map of an adult male fruit fly’s central nervous system, scientists celebrated it for its impact on neuroscience. Software engineers, however, had other ideas by immediately putting the dataset of the fly to greater use: training it play video games like Doom, Super Mario 64, and Beat Saber.
A quick word about the underlying achievement, though: the decade-long project between Google Research and HHMI’s Janelia Research Campus has produced the largest complete brain map by neuron count of a fly to date. Designated as MaleCNS v1.0 connectome, the digital map consists of over 166,000 neurons and roughly 125 million synaptic connections across the fly’s brain and central nervous system (beating out prior achievements by quite a margin).
Researchers achieved this by slicing the insect’s nervous system into millions of ultra-thin sections, scanning them under high-powered electron microscopes, and relying on AI...
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