WIGGLY GATORHOME / RACE A FLYNot a cartoon fly. A real, reconstructed fruit-fly nervous system - actual neurons, actual synapses, actually trained with reinforcement learning.
Watch each fly's best run at Wiggly Gator from 45,000 attempts, or challenge one head-to-head.
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The neural wiring comes from the MaleCNS reconstructed fruit-fly connectome — a real, published map of an entire fruit fly's brain and nervous system, released in 2025, covering roughly 166,700 neurons and the ~25.6 million real synapses connecting them.
Only about 2,500 of those 166,700 neurons are actually simulated — traced outward from the fly's real obstacle-detecting neurons to the real motor-command neurons they connect to. The rest (smell, taste, courtship, wing control) has nothing to do with dodging a log.
The earliest attempt at training had zero exploration - a fully deterministic brain in a fully deterministic river. Result: the exact same score, down to the millisecond, on all 80 straight attempts. Later versions finally learned by trying something different and keeping whatever worked.
The fly's output is mapped directly onto the game's own left, right, or neutral steering command — the exact same three inputs any keyboard or touchscreen player has. No extra control, no shortcut, nothing more than what a real person gets.
A real, scroll-driven 3D tour of the actual reconstructed connectome - 2,476 real neurons, 11,364 real synapses, signed and colored from real neurotransmitter data, pulled apart to show exactly how a signal travels from eye to escape command.
TAKE THE TOUR →Every fly here is a real, replayable run. Race one side by side, or just watch it go.