The Latest Weird Thing to Play Doom Is the Mapped-Out Brain of a Fruit Fly
Tech > Gaming The Latest Weird Thing to Play Doom Is the Mapped-Out Brain of a Fruit Fly Google Research mapped a male fruit fly’s brain, and it only took a few days for modders to start making it play Doom. Joe Hindy Joe is a freelance journalist.… Read full bio Joe Hindy Read full bio September 13, 2026, 8:20 am ET 2 min read All of the inputs are being done by the fly's brain mapping. None of it is assisted by humans or anything else.
- ▪Tech > Gaming The Latest Weird Thing to Play Doom Is the Mapped-Out Brain of a Fruit Fly Google Research mapped a male fruit fly’s brain, and it only took a few days for modders to start making it play Doom.
- ▪Joe Hindy Joe is a freelance journalist.… Read full bio Joe Hindy Read full bio September 13, 2026, 8:20 am ET 2 min read All of the inputs are being done by the fly's brain mapping.
- ▪None of it is assisted by humans or anything else.
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| Original publisher | CNET |
| Canonical URL | https://www.cnet.com/tech/gaming/simulated-fruit-fly-brain-plays-doom/ |
| Publication time | 2026-09-13T12:20:03Z |
| Retrieval time | 2026-09-13T12:41:50.178Z |
| Last seen | 2026-09-13T12:41:50.178Z |
| 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 | tBRaMza5PKHz · 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
Tech > Gaming The Latest Weird Thing to Play Doom Is the Mapped-Out Brain of a Fruit Fly Google Research mapped a male fruit fly’s brain, and it only took a few days for modders to start making it play Doom. Joe Hindy Joe is a freelance journalist.… Read full bio Joe Hindy Read full bio September 13, 2026, 8:20 am ET 2 min read All of the inputs are being done by the fly's brain mapping. None of it is assisted by humans or anything else. Doomfly Doom is such a simple, beautifully designed game that it can run on all sorts of weird things, from pregnancy tests to potatoes. Weird things can play it, too. In an effort to eternally one-up itself, the community has now gotten a map of a fruit fly’s brain to play the 1993 first-person shooter.
…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at CNET.
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