Researchers at Google and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Janelia Research Campus mapped the complete brain and central nervous system of an adult male fruit fly, releasing a 3D dataset of over 166,000 neurons that software engineers quickly adapted to run classic video games like Doom.
Scientists completed a decade-long project to map the complete nervous system of an adult male fruit fly, creating a publicly available wiring diagram that details more than 166,000 neurons and 125 million synaptic connections. Announced on Sept. 3, 2026, the milestone achievement represents the largest brain map by number of neurons to date, providing a fundamental resource for scientists to use fruit flies as a model organism for studying how the brain works. Google and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Janelia Research Campus published the findings, which are designed to serve as a resource for researchers studying how animal nervous systems perceive the world, react to stimuli, and how damaged neural pathways might one day be repaired. Scientists have been using fruit flies for research for over a century, with the winged insects maintaining a strong history in the avenues of genetic research and remaining relevant in the 2020s in genetics, neuroscience, and more.
To build the dataset, scientists sliced the nervous system into millions of extremely thin sections, imaged them with an electron microscope, and then used computers and AI to turn those 2D images into 3D reconstructions of neurons, combining millions of 2D images into 3D neural shapes and reconstructing a record-breaking 166,000+ neurons. Scientists then spent years verifying and annotating the results. Google noted that this scientific breakthrough is going to accelerate our understanding of the brain and is a major milestone in neuroscience. Because mapping the roughly 86 billion neurons in a human brain is not possible yet, scientists are starting with smaller organisms like fruit flies.
Engineers Train the MaleCNS v1.0 Connectome to Play Doom
It took only days for software developers to repurpose the newly released connectome, known as MaleCNS v1.0, for recreational computing experiments. On Monday, software engineers were already demonstrating the full MaleCNS v1.0 fruit fly connectome being trained to play Doom, as well as Super Mario 64. Software engineer Alex Wormuth posted on Sept. 6, 2026, that he is using the project’s data to train a simulated fly brain to play Doom. Wormuth wrote on X, I'm training a fly brain to play Doom using the full MaleCNS v1.0 fruit fly connectome.
Wormuth’s setup maps game visual input directly to the simulated sensory neurons, explaining that each Doom frame stimulates sensory neurons, neural activity is mapped to game controls, and damage triggers a stimulus to two PPL101 dopamine cells as reinforcement. Wormuth closed his tweet with the question, Will the fly learn to survive?
The code is fully open source, and you can also watch the training progress of the 166,700 neurons live online as the project is being livestreamed.
Super Mario 64 and Minecraft Adaptations Follow
Wormuth’s project was not the only gaming experiment to emerge over the same period. Another developer, Jessica Paquette, posted Monday about a similar project using the fly brain data to play Super Mario 64, with her fly-brain tinkering focusing on Mario 64. In a video she posted, Mario can be seen jumping and repeatedly bumping into walls, showing Mario repeatedly taking off and bumping into a wall.
Paquette also posted the project’s code on GitHub, where she wrote that the code is 100% vibe coded with GPT Astra, noting it was literally 100% vibe coded with GPT Astra just for fun. Other programmers directed the connectome data into different digital environments. Yet another user on X wrote that they successfully ran the full retained MaleCNS v1.0 fruit fly connectome, all 166,700 neurons, inside Minecraft, with its simulated neural activity driving a fly’s movement. And it wasn’t just video games people experimented with, as one X user said he fine-tuned the simulated fly brain to make Y-M-C-A poses in response to four different tones, and another user made the simulated fly brain watch the viral Bad Apple!! animation to see how it reacted.
Future Connectome Mapping Beyond Fruit Flies
It wouldn’t be surprising to see even more fly brain projects pop up online in the coming months, at least until programmers get a new brain to play with. Conveniently, Google is already looking beyond flies. The company is working with researchers on connectomes for fish and mice.
Читайте также
