Fruit Fly Survival
한국어A fruit fly brain game: you pick the weapons, a connectome circuit does the dodging
One fruit fly on a kitchen table. Ants and spiders close in, a swatter comes down. You hand the fly its weapons. The dodging is done by a spiking model of its escape circuit. Last 6 minutes and the kitchen lights go out.
No account, and no loot boxes. Picking weapons and the run's outcome are always free.
A reduced model built from part of the real fruit fly nervous system (the escape circuit and a few more), extracted from connectome data. It is far smaller than the real brain (about 139,000 neurons), and the links from enemy position to visual input and from neural output to movement are our own design choices for the game.
Loading the circuit
Escape circuit
How to play
Hit Start and the fly moves on its own. No keys, no joystick.
Collect juice drops to level up, then pick one of three. Weapons fire by themselves.
When a swatter shadow grows, the fly's looming detectors fire. If the Giant Fiber spikes, the fly jumps. We slow that moment down so you can see it.
The circuit running right now
812 neurons, 11,443 connections, 204,286 synapses, extracted from the public hemibrain and MANC datasets.
More games
Other quick games from the same shop.
Data credits
The neural model uses neuron IDs and synapse counts extracted from the two public datasets below. Both are released under CC BY 4.0.
- hemibrain v1.2 (Janelia FlyEM). Scheffer LK, Xu CS, et al. (2020) A connectome and analysis of the adult Drosophila central brain. eLife 9:e57443. doi:10.7554/eLife.57443. CC BY 4.0
- MANC v1.0 (Janelia FlyEM). Takemura S, et al. (2024) A connectome of the male Drosophila ventral nerve cord. eLife 13:RP97769. doi:10.7554/eLife.97769. CC BY 4.0
- Neuron parameters come from the public code (MIT) of Shiu PK, et al. (2024) A Drosophila computational brain model reveals sensorimotor processing. Nature 634:210-219.
Changes: we kept only the escape pathway, mirrored the right-brain data to make a left brain, and dropped recurrent links on the brain side. Full rules are in the guide.