CyberFly
Hologram flies on Snap Spectacles; each runs full MaleCNS on a Mac Metal GPU while the glasses stream room senses.
Neurons are simulated — leaky integrate-and-fire or better — with documented, tuned parameters.
Dispute this rating →The evidence
No evidence, no level.Every fly runs the full MaleCNS connectome as the Shiu et al. 2024 leaky integrate-and-fire model.
https://github.com/PtPavloTkachenko/fly-brain-spectacles/blob/20413b4bb888f7ced63d42451250539a55d9e625/README.md#L12The engine requires frozen weights because the connectome is shared between flies.
https://github.com/PtPavloTkachenko/fly-brain-spectacles/blob/20413b4bb888f7ced63d42451250539a55d9e625/brain_server/engine/engine.py#L17The live sensory loop steps the brain with learning explicitly disabled.
https://github.com/PtPavloTkachenko/fly-brain-spectacles/blob/20413b4bb888f7ced63d42451250539a55d9e625/brain_server/worker.py#L85The GPU kernel refuses to run if weight writes are requested, so no plasticity can occur in the shipped path.
https://github.com/PtPavloTkachenko/fly-brain-spectacles/blob/20413b4bb888f7ced63d42451250539a55d9e625/brain_server/engine/metal/metal_engine.py#L131The 'reward' signal is an injected current into PAM11 dopamine cells — stimulation, not a weight change.
https://github.com/PtPavloTkachenko/fly-brain-spectacles/blob/20413b4bb888f7ced63d42451250539a55d9e625/brain_server/channels.py#L41The project records the decision not to train: 'Plasticity is off.'
https://github.com/PtPavloTkachenko/fly-brain-spectacles/blob/20413b4bb888f7ced63d42451250539a55d9e625/docs/DECISIONS.md#L8-L9
The full 166,700-neuron MaleCNS is simulated as the Shiu et al. 2024 LIF model, on a Metal GPU kernel in this repo whose state is membrane voltage, synaptic conductance, adaptation and refractory counter, validated bit-identical against the CPU kernel. Not L2, and confirmed at the call site rather than taken from the README: every step is invoked with `learning=False`, the engine's own docstring says 'Weights must stay frozen: the connectome is shared, a learning fly would write it', the Metal kernel raises outright if weight writes are requested, and ADR 02 records the decision as 'Plasticity is off.' This project is also a clean instance of the dopamine trap: its 'reward' channel is an injected current into the real PAM11 cells and 'punish' into PPL101 — labelled 'artificial dopamine (disclose on the board)' — which is stimulation of dopamine neurons, not a synaptic learning rule. Note that the LIF kernel's reference implementation comes from the fly-wirehead package cloned at a pinned commit into the runtime folder, so the canonical neuron model lives upstream; the Metal reimplementation and its constants are in this repo.
Record
Nearby
All projects →MaleCNS simulation connected to ViZDoom through modeled visual inputs and a fixed button readout. Includes plasticity experiments and negative validation results; learned survival has not been demonstrated.
Research framework comparing a MaleCNS-constrained sparse recurrent controller with rewired graphs, conventional neural networks, and other controls on simple VizDoom tasks.
Ratings on thelearningfly.com are proposals, not verdicts. Every one of them is arguable in public.