Is There Anything Google’s Fruit Fly Brain Can’t Do?
Models of the insect’s nervous system have been trained to solve a Rubik’s Cube, play video games and even parallel park a car.
Models of the insect’s nervous system have been trained to solve a Rubik’s Cube, play video games and even parallel park a car.
What can a fruit fly do? Buzz around ripe bananas, sure. But maybe, a whole lot more. Like parallel park. Or play Minecraft.
Creative internet users have in recent days taken a complete map of a fruit fly’s 166,000 neurons, published by Google, and made simulated flies do some things that are pretty impressive, given that these insects have a brain the size of a poppy seed. One has been trained to solve a Rubik’s Cube. Another dances to the Village People’s “Y.M.C.A.” in response to four tones. Others have envisioned fruit flies playing poker and blackjack and slicing a doner kebab.
In general, the goal of these engineers and artists is not to show what a fly can do, but “what’s the dumbest thing we can make it do,” said Mark Unthank, a software developer who got a fly to parallel park a car after hundreds of failed attempts. Mr. Unthank, who lives in Italy, also programmed a fly to use a car’s blinkers when turning because he was frustrated that so few human drivers seem to use them.
“That’s how easy it is,” he said. “Even a fly could do it.”
Producing the map of the fly’s brain, on the other hand, was anything but easy. It was serious research meant to advance the study of neuroscience.
For years, researchers worked to develop sophisticated imaging techniques to map the connections within the nervous systems of various organisms. Some have focused on fruit flies because of the insect’s relative lack of complexity; while the fly has just 166,000 neurons, a human being has about 86 billion.
