← The index · Games & control · by charbelkassab

flybrain-snake

Live MaleCNS (~165k neurons) playing Snake, with the control mapping documented instead of hidden.

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

Whole-CNS leaky integrate-and-fire over the 165k-neuron MaleCNS graph with fully stated parameters (V_rest -52 mV, V_th -45 mV, tau_m 20 ms, tau_syn 5 ms, 2 ms refractory, spike-frequency adaptation), following Shiu et al. with documented deviations. Not L2: the connectome matrix W is loaded from disk and only ever read (`self.W[:, delayed].sum`); the only thing fitted is a separate multinomial logistic decoder over the 1,314 descending neurons, trained by gradient descent in experiment.py. The README is explicit that 'the brain itself is not trained', and the project's best result (mean 25.4) comes from that bolt-on readout. Its scrambled-wiring control is unusually good practice but is an ablation of fixed wiring, not plasticity.

Record

CategoryGames & control
DatasetsMaleCNS
LevelL1 — reviewed
Listed intownie/awesome-fruit-fly
First indexed2026-09-15

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