Male Fruit Fly Brain Trained to Play Doom

Google recently unveiled a precise 3D model of an adult male fruit fly's brain and central nervous system. A software engineer at Coinbase then revealed that the fruit fly's brain was being trained to play the classic video game Doom. Alex Wormuth explained that each frame of Doom stimulates sensory neurons, which are subsequently mapped to game controls.

When the fly receives damage, a stimulus is sent to dopamine cells PPL101 to reinforce the action. Following Doom, the digital brain model was adapted to control other games such as Beat Saber and Super Mario 64.

The fruit fly's performance in these games can be observed in real-time on Wormuth's website, displaying both the fly's perspective in Doom and a third-person view of its movement around the game maps. As of writing, the fruit fly is on round 6385 of Doom, but it is not performing well. Modders have been actively working on enhancing the fly's abilities, successfully adapting the brain to play Beat Saber with commendable skill.

Lyra Bubbles showcased the fly's progress in Beat Saber, teaching the fly to react to the song's notes through reinforcement learning. Although the fly is not reacting organically to the notes, it responds to stimuli and receives input to perform the actions. Further training aims to minimize reliance on external signals, allowing the fly to play more reactively without additional data.

Jessica Paquette, a fly engineer, shared her experience using the digital fruit fly brain to navigate Super Mario 64. Ro0oney, a YouTuber, took the concept even further by incorporating the fruit fly brain into Minecraft, using Flywire.AI, a project developed in collaboration with Princeton University. Flywire.AI analysis employed a female brain model (with 160,000+ neurons) instead of Google's male brain model (139,255 neurons).

Despite these differences, the fundamental principles remain the same across all these modified fruit fly brain applications.