“The more aroused the fly is the harder it tries to shoot” - Google’s fully mapped fly brain is now playing Doom, Beat Saber, and more
Google has achieved a historic milestone by completing the first full connectome (neural map) of a fruit fly brain, revealing approximately 3,000 neurons and their interconnections in unprecedented detail. The company’s research team released this comprehensive brain model publicly, making it available for download and further research.
Days after the connectome’s release, researchers successfully trained a neural model based on the mapped fly brain to play video games, including the classic shooter Doom and the rhythm-action game Beat Saber. This represents a fascinating intersection of neuroscience and gaming, where the artificial neural network derived from the fly brain was adapted to control game actions.
The achievement demonstrates how computational models of biological neural systems can be applied to interactive environments. The fly brain model’s “arousal” level—a metric reflecting its activation state—directly correlates with performance intensity, with higher arousal corresponding to more aggressive gameplay actions such as increased shooting in Doom.
The project required years of meticulous work, incorporating artificial intelligence to help organize and map the complex web of neural connections. By publishing the connectome data publicly, Google has enabled broader scientific collaboration and sparked creative experiments like these gaming demonstrations. The project exemplifies how open-source neuroscience data can lead to novel applications in both AI research and biomimetic system development.