Researchers Mapped a Fruit Fly Brain. Software Engineers Got It to Play Doom
Damage triggers a stimulus to two PPL101 dopamine cells as reinforcement.” Wormuth’s website shows both the fly’s POV and a third-person fly cam, but as PC Gamers notes, the fruit fly is not very good at Doom. Hacker and developer Domi got the fly playing shooters, too. “The visuals are rendered into the fly eyes and brain decides where to turn.
- ▪Damage triggers a stimulus to two PPL101 dopamine cells as reinforcement.” Wormuth’s website shows both the fly’s POV and a third-person fly cam, but as PC Gamers notes, the fruit fly is not very good at Doom.
- ▪Hacker and developer Domi got the fly playing shooters, too.
- ▪“The visuals are rendered into the fly eyes and brain decides where to turn.
PCMag files mainly under tech. We currently carry 495 of its stories.
Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
inspect →
Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | PCMag |
| Canonical URL | https://www.pcmag.com/news/researchers-map-fruit-fly-brain-software-engineers-made-it-play-doom |
| Publication time | Fri, 11 Sep 26 19:09:06 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-09-11T19:28:35.722Z |
| Last seen | 2026-09-11T19:28:35.722Z |
| 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 | 0uROGLEIbkMg · 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 |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| 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
Researchers recently used AI to create a brain map of a male fruit fly, and what better way to take advantage of that breakthrough than to use it to play Doom?The team from HHMI Janelia, Google Research, and other collaborators say their "years-long project," which includes more than 166,000 neurons, "promises to be a foundational resource for neuroscience for years to come." But as PC Gamer reports, it also inspired people like Coinbase software engineer Alex Wormuth to train the fly brain to play Doom and other games.“Each Doom frame stimulates sensory neurons [in the fly brain],” Wormuth tweeted. “Neural activity is mapped to game controls.
…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at PCMag.
Discussion
0 commentsMore from PCMag
