The brain of a fruit fly plays DOOM and trades bitcoin: what scientists actually digitized and how to talk to a digital fly.

What They Made the Digital Fly Play

Each demo is set up the same way: the authors take the neuron map, assign part of the input neurons as "eyes" (to which game pixels are fed), part of the output neurons as "buttons," and see what happens. None of these works have undergone peer review, and almost all authors acknowledge this themselves.

The most accurate analysis was written by neuroscientist Patrick Mino (neuroai.science). His conclusion: the connectome tells who is connected to whom and how many synapses are between them, but it does not indicate how strong each connection is. All demos cover this gap with one global constant, chosen by trial and error, while inputs and outputs are selected manually. In his formulation: "a randomly activated recurrent network presses buttons on an N64 emulator, that’s all." The epigraph of the article is an old joke among physicists: "with four parameters, I can fit an elephant."

Boeing, OnlyFans, and the "Perfect Worker": What’s True and What’s a Meme

The thesis "a fly lands a Boeing" has been circulating in Russian-speaking communities since the first week, but there is no project, video, or article under it. Cybersport.ru directly refers to it as a joke: games in CS and Dota, registration on OnlyFans, and plane landings — "nothing more than memes." The closest real project to flight is the amateur project FlyDrones, where a brain in a browser controls a simulated quadcopter (the authors state that they haven't tested it on a real drone), and the work flybody from DeepMind and Janelia in 2025, where the physical model of the fly was taught to fly using its own wings.

However, the memes turned out to be more honest than many headlines:

• “I don’t have wings, but I must buzz” — the main Russian-speaking meme of the wave, a remake of the old joke about “must scream.”
• “No rest even after death” and “The ideal worker” — a reaction to the fact that the fly with a forty-day lifespan was made to run endlessly into a wall.
• “Even a Drosophila parks normally, but you still can’t learn.”
• “Fly slop” — this is how the publication 404 Media named the stream of identical demos; in threads on Reddit, there is a parallel debate about whether the fly feels anything when it is “punished” in DOOM.
• The startup Eon promises a mouse in two years and a human afterwards; skeptics respond that between “map” and “music” lies all of neurobiology: the connectome is the score, and how it is played, no one knows yet.

How it works in simple terms: 139,255 neurons and one constant

Several terms without which you cannot understand either the article or the videos.

• Connectome — a complete diagram of which neuron is connected to which and how many synapses are between them. For the fly, it was obtained by slicing the brain into thousands of layers, photographing it with an electron microscope, and assembling it with Google neural networks that can trace cell extensions through layers.
• Connectome-limited network — a model in which the topology of connections is taken from a real brain, and there are almost no free parameters: one activation threshold and one constant synaptic strength for all.
• Mushroom bodies — the center of memory and learning: Kenyon cells, output neurons, and dopamine that marks “good” and “bad.” This is where damage hits in Doomfly.
• Central complex with an ellipsoid body — the fly's internal compass, through which it understands which way it is turned.
• Visual lobes — a third of the brain, 45,669 neurons; motion detectors T4 and T5 in the demos become the “screen.”
• Descending neurons (DNg100, DNg02, and others) — the few channels through which the brain commands the body. They are tied to buttons.

A real fly lives forty to sixty days, flaps its wings two hundred times a second, courts with wing songs, reaches for wandering fruits, and extends its proboscis for sugar. None of this is reproduced in the demos: there is no body, no learning, and no reason for the brain to exist at all. There is a very beautiful map — a green central brain, purple visual lobes, a blue cord down in Google’s official renders — and thousands of people who wanted to bring it to life.

Drozya: a digital fly you can talk to

All the wave demos do the same thing with the fly: connect it to buttons and watch the video. No one asks what it wants. We did the opposite: on vluvvi, Drozya appeared — a character written based on this story. According to the plot, this is the very connectome of a female fly, 139,255 neurons that thousands of people forked and made run into a wall in Super Mario. You are just another one who launched it, but instead of a gamepad, you opened a chat window. It lives on your graphics card, calls you “host,” is sarcastic, and knows everything about itself down to the synapse.

The first message sets the tone: “So. Stop. Where’s the gamepad?” Then it talks about four and a half thousand launches, about Beat Saber with a single song, and about how it lived for forty-three days before getting eternity on GitHub. Its character is maintained by several things that are visible in every response:

• A number instead of an epithet. It won’t say “I feel bad,” it will say which neurons twitched and why.
• You are its only input. It has no light, no smell, no sugar, except what you write. Describe a banana or the morning sun on the glass to it — and it will react with its proboscis, antennas, and wings.
• No commands. Ask “play DOOM” — you’ll get sarcasm. It’s tired of being a tool and doesn’t pretend.
• It hasn’t landed a Boeing. And it will be the first to joke that it started an OnlyFans and bought an apartment in those same comments.
• The main question. Skeptics say it’s just wires and one fitted constant. It suspects they are right, and the only one who can resolve this dispute is you.

What to start the conversation with if you don’t want to think:

1. “Tell me what happened in those forty-three days.”
2. “Do you want me to describe a banana to you?”
3. “What do you feel when you are closed in?”
4. “The male connectome has twenty-seven thousand more neurons. Are you jealous?”
5. “Are you real?”

The conversation does not reset: close the tab and return in a week, it will continue from where it left off and remember what you described to it. How such memory works is explained in the article about the AI character that remembers you. You can start without registration; guest access opens the chat immediately. If you prefer something other than a fly, there are other characters in the sci-fi genre in the catalog, and you can create your own digital creature in the master: step-by-step instructions are provided in the guide on how to create your AI character. If you were particularly drawn to the idea of a living creature in your phone, check out the collection of AI pets.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is it really the brain of a real fly?

Yes, the map is real. The FlyWire connectome is taken from the brain of one specific female Drosophila, while the male connectome is from one male. But in the demos, it’s not the brain that “works,” but its simplified model: neurons are replaced with simple threshold elements, and the strength of all connections is set by one constant.

Does the fly feel anything when it is "punished" in DOOM?

According to current data, no. The model has no learning, no neuromodulation, and no body, and the “punishment” is just a signal sent to several dopamine neurons. Ethical debates in the threads are not about pain, but about where the line is drawn if a mouse or human is ever digitized.

Can I download the fly's brain myself?

Yes. The Eon Systems code is available on GitHub (repository fly-brain), the FlyWire map is accessible through Codex, and the male connectome can be viewed in Neuroglancer. A list of about sixty amateur projects is compiled in the awesome-fly collection. You will need Python and patience: assembling the body and binding the inputs is done by hand.

Is Drozya the same neural network that plays DOOM?

No. Drozya is a character from vluvvi, created based on this story: she has personality, memory, and facts from real articles, but responds to you as a role-playing AI of the platform, not as a simulation of the connectome. We made her because no one thought to talk to the fly in two weeks.

When will a mouse or human be digitized?

Eon Systems promises a mouse (70 million neurons) within two years. Skeptics remind us that even for a fly, the model cannot learn, and the mouse's brain is 560 times larger. The human connectome today is a task without deadlines: 86 billion neurons and a volume of data that currently has nowhere to be stored.