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MaleCNS on Apple MPS

Experimental PyTorch MPS simulator for Apple Silicon with verified data preparation, named-cell stimulation, and 3D activity reports.

MaleCNS
Fidelity · reviewed
L1 Dynamics

Neurons are simulated — leaky integrate-and-fire or better — with documented, tuned parameters.

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The evidence

No evidence, no level.
Rating note

A PyTorch MPS simulator of MaleCNS v1.0 (166,700 neurons, 25.6M directed connections) with an explicit discrete LIF update - v[t+1] = exp(-dt/tau) v[t] + gain*W*spike[t] + drive, threshold at 1, reset to zero - and documented dt_ms/tau_ms defaults, which earns L1. The repository also ships an A2C reinforcement-learning navigation task, and it is exactly the trained-readout pattern the scale exists to separate out, not L2: the connectome weights live in a registered buffer (not an nn.Parameter), the Adam optimizer is constructed over policy.parameters() only, and the README's 'implementation scope' paragraph states outright that MaleCNS is used as a fixed activity encoder, that the 25.58M original connection weights are not changed and that the LIF spike function is not backpropagated through. The README separately lists plasticity and learning among the things the model does not have. No synapse inside the fly circuit changes at any point.

Record

CategoryBrain models & bodies
DatasetsMaleCNS
LevelL1 — reviewed
Listed incobanov/awesome-fly
First indexed2026-09-15

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