← The index · Games & control · by ptpavlotkachenko

CyberFly

Hologram flies on Snap Spectacles; each runs full MaleCNS on a Mac Metal GPU while the glasses stream room senses.

MaleCNS
Fidelity · reviewed
L1 Dynamics

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

Dispute this rating →

The evidence

No evidence, no level.
Rating note

The full 166,700-neuron MaleCNS is simulated as the Shiu et al. 2024 LIF model, on a Metal GPU kernel in this repo whose state is membrane voltage, synaptic conductance, adaptation and refractory counter, validated bit-identical against the CPU kernel. Not L2, and confirmed at the call site rather than taken from the README: every step is invoked with `learning=False`, the engine's own docstring says 'Weights must stay frozen: the connectome is shared, a learning fly would write it', the Metal kernel raises outright if weight writes are requested, and ADR 02 records the decision as 'Plasticity is off.' This project is also a clean instance of the dopamine trap: its 'reward' channel is an injected current into the real PAM11 cells and 'punish' into PPL101 — labelled 'artificial dopamine (disclose on the board)' — which is stimulation of dopamine neurons, not a synaptic learning rule. Note that the LIF kernel's reference implementation comes from the fly-wirehead package cloned at a pinned commit into the runtime folder, so the canonical neuron model lives upstream; the Metal reimplementation and its constants are in this repo.

Record

CategoryGames & control
DatasetsMaleCNS
LevelL1 — reviewed
Listed intownie/awesome-fruit-fly
First indexed2026-09-15
[blogpavlo-stijn.dev/blog/posts/a-real-fly-brain-on-spect

Ratings on thelearningfly.com are proposals, not verdicts. Every one of them is arguable in public.