The internet is the fly's eye.
Two flies stand inside a ring. Everything they see is what people here paint on it, one cell at a time, brightness only.
One fly runs the mapped wiring of a real male fruit fly's central nervous system: 165,122 neurons. The other runs a twin with the same neurons and scrambled wiring. Paint to steer them toward your team's wall, and try to tell which one is real.
The ring
A 360° wall around both flies, 5° per cell, from 60° above the horizon to 60° below. The left edge meets the right edge. The lines above the ring show what each fly can see; the markers point straight ahead. Hover, or hold a finger on it, to look through the lens.
Pick a brightness (keys 1-9), then click a cell.
The arena
Seen from above. North is up.
What they see
Every facet is one column of an eye in the dataset, holding a real L1 and L2 neuron, drawn where it sits in the medulla. Hover or tap for their body IDs.
Descending neurons
How far each signal is from its own brain's resting value, in standard deviations. This is the joystick.
The Turk's record
| Round | Real | Crowd said | Guesses A / B | Real fly's wall | Twin's wall | Fly time | Spikes/s real / twin |
|---|
What is measured, what is chosen, what is not claimed
Measured
Chosen by people
Not claimed
- A mind. Nothing here shows that either fly is conscious, suffers, or wants anything.
- A real fly's behaviour. The simulation leaves out the photoreceptors, neuromodulators, electrical synapses, synaptic delays, and everything that makes one neuron differ from another.
- Any particular behaviour. Real flies escape looming shapes and turn toward dark bars. Whether these flies do is what you are finding out.
- Real time. The brains compute slower than a fly lives. The brain clock in the header shows by how much.
- That the twin is a "fake brain". It has the same neurons and the same eye and motor readout. Only who connects to whom is random. If you can't tell them apart, that is a result.
What paint did before anyone painted
Measured at startup with fixed views held in front of each brain, walked by the game's own rule. Positive turn is to the right.
Resting rates
Each brain looking at an all-grey ring. The game reads every signal against these.
Where this comes from
- 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 demo on faith.
- 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.
- 2008
LED arenas. Reiser and Dickinson published modular LED displays for showing insects controlled visual worlds. The ring is that kind of arena, painted by strangers.
- 2014
Twitch Plays Pokémon. More than a million people played one game together through chat.
- 2017
r/place. About a million people placed 16 million pixels on one shared canvas in 72 hours.
- 2026
The male CNS connectome. HHMI Janelia, the Cambridge Connectomics Group and Google Research released the complete central nervous system of a male fruit fly, openly, under CC-BY.