The internet is the fly's eye.

Two simulated flies stand inside a ring. Everything they see is what people paint on it. One runs the mapped wiring of a real male fruit fly's brain, 165,122 neurons. The other is a scrambled twin. Steer them, and try to tell which one is real.

Enter the ring How it works

connecting round – – here now – cells painted

This fly is an animation. Get close and it escapes, the way real flies do. The real ones are live.

The token

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On Robinhood Chain. The project holds no wallet and gives no advice.

How a crowd steers a real brain

Paint becomes light, light becomes spikes, spikes become steps. Every step is computed, and every choice people made along the way is listed on the live page.

  1. You paint

    One cell of grey, every few seconds. Brightness is all the flies can see.

  2. The ring

    A 360° wall around both flies. Turning changes what each one sees.

  3. The eyes

    1,767 real eye columns, each an L1 and L2 neuron from the dataset.

  4. The brain

    165,122 neurons fire spike by spike across 10,228,000 connections.

  5. They walk

    Descending neurons steer a body toward one of six walls. Only the real fly scores.

One of them is real. Can you tell?

Each round, fly A and fly B get the same view and the same random seed. One runs the real connectome. The other runs its twin: the same neurons, each keeping its number of connections, every target shuffled. The crowd votes, and the page scores it against a coin flip.

–rounds played

–crowd majority right

–vs. a coin flip

Make your call

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real rug-dumps the trained fly caught in testing. Its scrambled twin caught 3.

Can a fly smell a rug pull?

We trained the connectome's learning centre on real Pons launches on Robinhood Chain and tested it on launches it had never seen. It did not work. The checker is still here, with that number next to every answer. No wallet, no advice.

Where this comes from

  1. 1770

    The Turk. Wolfgang von Kempelen's chess machine beat people across Europe with a human player hidden inside. The twin is here so nobody has to take this on faith.

  2. 1910

    The Fly Room. Thomas Hunt Morgan found a white-eyed male among his fruit flies, and fly genetics began. The teams are named for the mutants that followed.

  3. 2008

    LED arenas. Reiser and Dickinson published modular displays for showing insects controlled visual worlds. The ring is that kind of arena, painted by strangers.

  4. 2014

    Twitch Plays Pokémon. More than a million people played one game together through chat.

  5. 2017

    r/place. About a million people placed 16 million pixels on one shared canvas in 72 hours.

  6. 2026

    The male CNS connectome. HHMI Janelia, the Cambridge Connectomics Group and Google Research released a male fruit fly's complete central nervous system, openly, under CC-BY.

Paint the fly's world.

It takes one cell.

Enter the ring