A Digital Fly Brain Has Taken Over the Internet
Evan Sinclair Smith, a graduate student in computer science at Georgia Tech, pioneered the viral trend after he programmed the fly brain to play Minecraft. Within a day of releasing the results on September 4, the Minecraft fly had accumulated millions of views.I’ve successfully run 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.V1 Currently in development. However, it’s worth emphasizing that MaleCNS v1.0 is only a digital map of the brain that is not capable of sentience or conscious perception in any tangible biological sense.
- ▪Evan Sinclair Smith, a graduate student in computer science at Georgia Tech, pioneered the viral trend after he programmed the fly brain to play Minecraft.
- ▪Within a day of releasing the results on September 4, the Minecraft fly had accumulated millions of views.I’ve successfully run the full retained MaleCNS v1.0 fruit fly connectome, all 166,700 neurons, inside Minecraft, with its simulated n
- ▪However, it’s worth emphasizing that MaleCNS v1.0 is only a digital map of the brain that is not capable of sentience or conscious perception in any tangible biological sense.
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| Original publisher | 404 Media |
| Canonical URL | https://www.404media.co/a-digital-fly-brain-has-taken-over-the-internet/ |
| Publication time | Tue, 15 Sep 2026 15:28:04 GMT |
| Retrieval time | 2026-09-15T15:31:52.719Z |
| Last seen | 2026-09-15T15:31:52.719Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | xCag5CV5N-Lf · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
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| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
A digital fly brain has been trading bitcoin, parallel parking, exploring bisexuality, cutting doner kebab, playing games—including Minecraft, Doom, and Beat Saber—and generally lighting up social media timelines since it was released earlier this month.The simulated brain, known as a connectome, is a complete map of more than 166,000 neurons that make up the nervous system of an adult male Drosophila fruit fly. Developed by HHMI Janelia Research Campus in partnership with Google Research, the connectome (dubbed MaleCNS v1.0) was unveiled earlier this month, following the release of the first adult female fruit fly connectome in 2024.But can it run DOOM?!Well...actually, yes.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at 404 Media.
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