Loading the fly…

Can a fly
play Tetris?

318 real neurons and 13,620 real connections from a mapped fruit-fly brain are at the keyboard. Nothing is trained. It plays badly.

Score
0
Lines
0
Games
0
Best
0

Keys pressed

How it works

01 · The eyes

The input neurons are LC4 and LPLC2, the cells a fly uses to spot something about to hit it. The left eye watches the left half of the board and the right eye watches the right. As a block falls it gets "closer" and looms harder. The faint blue columns on the screen show what each eye is seeing.

02 · The brain

240 middle-brain neurons are the strongest real links between those eyes and the fly's command neurons. Every weight is a real synapse count. Each neuron is a leaky integrate-and-fire model (Shiu et al., 2024), stepped every 0.1 ms.

03 · The keys

Four groups of descending neurons, which carry commands from brain to body, are wired to the arrow keys. Turn-left cells press ←, turn-right cells press →, walk-forward cells press ↑ to rotate, and escape cells press ↓ to drop. Whichever group is most unusually active presses its key, and the fly's front leg taps it.

This is a toy, not a science result. The wiring and the body are real, but how the board becomes eye input, how neurons become keys, and how the legs move are my design. A real fly would just fly away.