It’s science-fiction Friday as Google’s fully mapped fly brain, which was revealed last week, has been engineered to play Doom and rhythm-action game Beat Saber.
Google’s brain-mapping is a historic first and the model of the fly brain – which took years of work and AI-help to compile – was released by the company’s research team and made available for download. A few days later, as reported by PC Gamer, this resulted in the brain being trained to play Doom.
“I’m training a fly brain to play Doom using the full MaleCNS v1.0 fruit fly connectome,” announced Coinbase engineer Alex Wormuth, who also published a live video feed of the simulated fly’s progress. Apparently it played thousands of times and is still not doing very well.
Not long after, another enterprising engineer, domi on Bluesky, got the fly brain playing lightsaber-based rhythm-action game Beat Saber. A video shows a little fly model waving the lightsabers around and slicing through advancing tiles, probably better than I would.
The same modder got the fly brain playing shooters, using the fly’s brain to work out when to turn, apparently, and its “courtship song” for when to shoot. “The more aroused the fly is the harder it tries to shoot,” domi noted, alarmingly.
Google had already successfully mapped the brain of a female adult fruit fly, but this time it’s a male fruit fly’s brain that’s been mapped – and as Google pointed out, there’s a notable difference. “It’s a big step in advancing neuroscience experiments”, Google said, perhaps envisioning it running on Doom, “and promises to be a foundational resource for neuroscience for years to come”.