The Latest Weird Thing to Play Doom Is the Mapped-Out Brain of a Fruit Fly
Doom is such a simple, beautifully designed game that it can run on all sorts of weird things, from pregnancy tests to potatoes. Weird things can play it, too. In an effort to eternally one-up itself, the community has now gotten a map of a fruit fly’s brain to play the 1993 first-person shooter.
It started with Google, which partnered with HHMI Janelia Research and other collaborators to map the brain and central nervous system of a male fruit fly. This mapping, which is weirdly beautiful, contains 11,700 types of neurons and 166,000 neurons overall, breaking the record for the most complex neuron mapping ever done.
The research is pretty cool: It involved taking very thin slices of a fly’s brain and body, imaging them and using AI to combine the millions of 2D images into 3D neural shapes. Google says that “knowing the structure of the brain...
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