Built on real work
by real people.
Race a Fly only exists because a real, published connectome was made freely available. Here's who actually did the work this experiment stands on.
Created by
- Shaun Mackey — brightridgecreative.comCreator, Wiggly Gator & Race a Fly
Inspiration
- DOOMFLYThe public project that first showed a real, connectome-derived simulated brain could play a video game
DOOMFLY is where the idea came from - but no DOOMFLY code was used anywhere in Race a Fly. The connectome loading, the leaky integrate-and-fire neuron simulation, the reward-modulated learning, and the Wiggly Gator integration itself were all built independently for this project.
The one specific thing carried over from DOOMFLY is a lesson, not code: it reportedly attempted training its full connectome-scale network all at once and reported not getting that working. Race a Fly deliberately did something different - training is scoped to just the ~2,300 real synapses feeding directly into the motor/descending pool (out of ~11,000 in the simulated subgraph), not the whole graph at once. That smaller, more tractable slice is what actually learns here. Full technical writeup in the journal.
The connectome data
Every neuron, synapse, and connection this experiment uses is real, published data from MaleCNS — the first complete wiring diagram of a male fruit fly's brain and ventral nerve cord together. Roughly 166,700 neurons and ~25.6 million synapses, released under a CC-BY 4.0 license.
- Janelia Research Campus (HHMI)Connectome reconstruction & release
- MRC Laboratory of Molecular BiologyConnectome reconstruction
- University of CambridgeConnectome reconstruction
- Google ResearchConnectome reconstruction
This project used the public per-neuron annotation, connectivity-weight, and neurotransmitter-prediction files from the MaleCNS v1.0 release. No proprietary or private data was used anywhere in Race a Fly.
Software
- PhaserGame engine powering Wiggly Gator itself
- Three.js3D neuron visualization on the brain-tour page
Methodology
The simulated nervous system is a standard leaky integrate-and-fire (LIF) spiking network, built directly from the real MaleCNS wiring for a sensory-to-motor subgraph (~2,476 neurons). Every score, run, and statistic published on this site comes from real, logged gameplay attempts against the actual Wiggly Gator game code — see the data page for the raw numbers and downloads.