8 ms·

A 3D fruit fly on macOS desktop powered by the real FlyWire connectome

383 points by phoenix120 29d ago

actionfromafar 29d ago
Now this is real AI.
- bitwize 29d ago
  This is straight up ghost-dubbing.
- naikrovek 29d ago
  [dead]
uniq7 29d ago
No demo video?
- davidkwast 29d ago
  I just found this video on YouTube now: https://youtu.be/A8fDr7Rr7yM?is=cHwOQVrli9oXLdqY https://youtu.be/A8fDr7Rr7yM?is=cHwOQVrli9oXLdqY
  - hmokiguess 29d ago
    Open to see what it was about, stayed for the banger soundtrack
  - yreg 29d ago
    That doesn't show this project.
- tedd4u 29d ago
  FYI it takes less than 30 seconds do clone, build, and run.
  - UltraSane 29d ago
    If you have a mac. I don't.
  - asimovDev 29d ago
    it would've taken the similar amount of time for the OP to do a 10 second screen recording and paste it into the project root to be linkable from the README.md and it would avoid thousands of people having to waste compute cycles and electricity and 30 seconds of their lives cloning and building , wouldn't it?
aperrien 29d ago
Interesting work! There's NeuroMechFly (https://github.com/NeLy-EPFL/flygym/ https://github.com/NeLy-EPFL/flygym/) available, you might try using that to simulate the fly body in real time as well.
pavel_lishin 29d ago
Ah, Mr. Acevedo, nice to see you.
a1o 29d ago
> What's modeled vs. measured > Honesty section: I wouldn’t mind an human written README
- vhantz 29d ago
  > live *spiking* simulation
- dag11 29d ago
  > runs as a 1 kHz leaky-integrate-and-fire (LIF) simulation That hyphenated thing is always such a give. Clearly a thing discussed in the Claude conversation, made its way into the plan, then the readme. It always creates hyphenated phrases out of things it feels are core requirements. I'm actually over caring about Claude's obsession with the concepts of "real", "honest", and "rather than". What annoys me the most now is how every single sentence, bullet, etc that even makes its way into the products it builds are advertisements for itself. Product settings pages now read like ads, or like something written by a student begging for extra credit from the teacher. You can't unsee it!
  - etienne89 29d ago
    To be fair, as a term it has always been written as "Integrate-and-Fire" neuron model. In this case correct would be "Leaky Integrate-and-Fire" but that is nitpicking. Resources that outdate ChatGPT: - W. Gerstner "Neuronal Dynamics" (2014): https://neuronaldynamics.epfl.ch/online/Ch1.S3.html https://neuronaldynamics.epfl.ch/online/Ch1.S3.html - E. Izhikevich "Which model to use for cortical spiking neurons?" (2004): https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/1333071 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/1333071
- rossy 29d ago
  > Honesty section: This one gets to me. Not only is it useless (paragraph would have the same meaning if it was removed) but wdym "honesty section," Claude? The whole readme should be honest! One of the many causes of psychological damage when reading AI-generated technical writing is the reminder that one of its tics is that declares when it's being honest or real, casting doubt on the rest.
causal 29d ago
I appreciate the open source approach over the startup's sensational claims. This is more transparent. That said, I think it still presents itself as if the fly is being controlled by the connectome, when (if I'm reading the source correctly) it's more accurate to say scripted behaviors have been hooked up to be triggered by the connectome. Put another way, you might as well have the "escape" trigger open a YouTube video of a fly flying away. That would probably be less misleading too.
- ramraj07 29d ago
  I would argue that this is pretty disingenuous (as is most connectomics research I suppose) since its implying we have a fully wired connectome of the fly thats actually meaningful.
  - squibonpig 29d ago
    Why isn't it and what do they have? I'm not really informed on this stuff.
    - melagonster 29d ago
      We only know which neurons are connected, not the weights.
      - solid_fuel 29d ago
        More than that, real neurons don’t behave anything like the ones we model in neural networks - real ones signal with pulses, in a manner where the timing seems as significant as the magnitude of the impulse. Typically simulated neural networks use continuous analog values instead of pulses and a sigmoid function to shape the output. Basically, the “wiring” might be the same but nothing beyond that is. - - - Actually, I may have spoken too soon. Looking over the code this does look like it implements spikey activation, which is more similar to living neurons. You are correct they don’t have the original weights though - in as much as the concept maps to biology. I am curious if this has a way to dynamically modify the weights as it runs - I consider that a major missing gap between real brains and computer simulated neural networks.
logicallee 29d ago
This is absolutely astounding. What an implementation. A connectome is like a full brain scan! I am asking Claude to port this to the browser and I'll host it, so you can try it without installing anything. Some details about the port: Claude is able to do porting tasks like this. I'll put up a link when you can try it in your browser. I was able to get it to port the complete BitNet b1.58 2-billion parameter model several versions ago (in February, so this would have been Opus 4.5) to browser, so it can do so. This will run on the browser. I'll have it make it so that on mobile you can tap the fly or turn on the camera and it sees you, and same on desktop actually. Since the connectome is only 668 neurons, this will run super fast. Actually I'll make it allow for several flies, and let you drop food. I did something like this before here[1] but using the real connectome is something very different and very amazing. I'll have it add an experimental 3D mode with threejs, I'm not sure if that is also possible or not, we'll have to see it. This size of task usually takes Claude a few hours, so check my comment in the morning for the implementation, I'll reply here once it's done and hosted. [1] https://stateofutopia.com/papers/1/evolving-brains-cull-long-inference-times.html https://stateofutopia.com/papers/1/evolving-brains-cull-long...
- mapontosevenths 29d ago
  It's pretty amazing stuff! I was very excited the first time I saw a connectome as well. Years ago I managed to get most of openworm running and connected to some Lego Mindstorms to let the worm roll around my house. I'm not even sure the connectome was finished at that time. Honestly, I barely had any idea what I was doing and we didn't have AI tools so I was never really sure what I wired to what. I did manage to hook... something to the ultrasound sensor and... another thing to the wheels so that when the sensor was triggered it would back up. What blew my mind was the realization that these weird hybrid critters were probably the first true immortals. Now that we have a full connectome, who will bother with another? Students will probably just keep instantiating copies of this one to tinker with forever.
  - logicallee 29d ago
    I can't imagine why people hate my comment so much (4 downvotes), when I linked an existing fruitfly project I already did, and Claude is working on what I wrote now, just as I wrote. Maybe people thought I was being sarcastic when I wrote "A connectome is like a full brain scan!" but I wrote that since maybe not everyone knows what a connectome means.
DaiPlusPlus 29d ago
I have no exposure to connectomes - or really anything quite like this (as opposed to good ol’ fashioned perceptrons) - so forgive my following uninformed question: Can someone explain if this software is ethical?
- deleted 29d ago
  [deleted]
- ramraj07 29d ago
  Why do you think it wont be?
  - twothreeone 29d ago
    Well, one obvious question is if the simulated brain experiences pain, or more generally can it suffer? And if so, how would we tell.
    - fluoridation 29d ago
      What does "suffering" mean? Define your boolean function, apply it to the state of the program, and you'll know if the program is currently suffering.
    - logicallee 29d ago
      I've ported it to the browser and connected a squash functionality behind an ethical guardrail (you have to lift a cover to engage this functionality). need to iterate on the ui but will share it soon. you can squash the bug and cause it real pain. it also sees you if you turn your camera on and reacts to your movements. this is all wired up and I'll post it shortly.
      - DaiPlusPlus 29d ago
        I can’t tell if you’re a talented comedian - or if you should be assessed for sociopathy.
deleted 29d ago
[deleted]
kypro 29d ago
Oh nice, might use this to create some art for my home. https://www.instagram.com/p/DMfi-9Vsl-u/ https://www.instagram.com/p/DMfi-9Vsl-u/ > Infinite Pain is a computer running a deterministic neural simulation of a microscopic nematode worm’s brain (c. elegans), subjected to regular pain stimuli.
- ddlsmurf 29d ago
  are you ok ?
  - kypro 28d ago
    Not really. I'm deeply disturbed by this kind of thing and our flippant approach to this technology. I'm trying to prompt an emotion reaction and reflection on that. If I'm serious, then how does it make you feel? Should I or anyone be creating art experiments like this? Or what if I just want to play around with this technology, should anyone be allowed to run neural simulations of any creature to satisfy my own curiosity? Even if you didn't like what I was doing and wanted to stop me, could you? Could anyone? It's worth thinking about. AI and progress in neuroscience and computational power should allow me to create a whole exhibit in my home of human neural simulations. Maybe god doesn't exist, or maybe he didn't create hell. But one day, perhaps soon, we humans will.
    - ddlsmurf 28d ago
      Those are good points. And for a serious answer, indeed we should probably be exploring the ethics of it now. It's just humanity never really did that before unleashing a new tech, so I'm not optimistic, but I wish you success on provoking reflexion. What you're doing now isn't bothering me really but only for a reason of scale, it's one of those balancing dilemnas like abortion, or "is it a pet or food". Ian M Banks' Surface Detail has a harrowing vision of the prolongation of what you're doing (I'm a huge fan). At the moment I'm more disturbed about stuff like those people who played doom on cells.
      - kypro 28d ago
_def 29d ago
next up: https://openworm.org/ https://openworm.org/
dekhn 29d ago
It's weird to write MacOS specific software in this era.
- bigyabai 29d ago
  The unstoppable "rewrite it in Swift!" vs the insurmountable "where's the Windows version?"
- MBCook 29d ago
  Why? If I was writing this I would write it for my OS. Why would I write it for anything else? I assume that’s what the author did.
- bashZorina_09 29d ago
  Is it? I'm observing the largest tech companies in the world release macOS/iOS-first or only, and consequently supports said version the best in this era.
- asimovDev 29d ago
  do you mean they should've spent more time writing for other platforms or do you insinuate that they should've shipped a chromium browser instead of writing native software?
  - dekhn 29d ago
    The former, although the latter (or simply making a web app) is also a legitimate solution.
- DonHopkins 29d ago
  You've curiously left out which platform it's not weird to write software for. Is there only one platform that's not weird, or is MacOS the only weird platform? Some of the best platforms and software are weird. Get over it.
  - dekhn 29d ago
    I write applications that run the same on all three main desktop platforms (typically): Mac, Windows, Linux. Writing an app for any single desktop platform is weird, unless the application uses some sort of specific functionality of that platform. In my case, I use Qt, but I've also written applications which had three UI drivers (X11/Win32/MacOS).
qingcharles 29d ago
At some point in the future would it be possible to simply download a DNA sequence of an entire animal as a "ROM" and boot it into a virtual "reality"? What detail level of reality would we have to emulate for an egg to grow into an adult animal?
- Leynos 29d ago
  To give you a sense of the computation needed, a spatiotemporal physics simulation of a minimal (493 gene) bacterium's full 105 minute cellular cycle took 4-6 days of GPU hours on two A100s. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0092867426001741 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S009286742... Compare this with a c elegens nematode: ~20000 protein coding genes and 959 cells, with all the extra machinery you'll find in a eukaryotic cell. I'm reading this as both a question of raw simulation surface and combinatorics.
  - fooker 29d ago
    We'd need analog solutions for this simulations, and slowly these solutions will start to resemble biology in a dystopian way.
  - atemerev 28d ago
    Depends on the simulation level. A lot of things can be abstracted away, we don't need to simulate everything down to atomic level.
myshapeprotocol 29d ago
[dead]
lp4v4n 29d ago
Would we be able to have a "digital human" when we reach the level of creating this kind of brain mapping for the human brain? Honestly I think we're still discovering how powerful neural networks are and certainly they can do computations that sound very close to intelligence in some contexts, but I still find it hard to think that we can simplify the whole reality of an incredibly complex chemical machinery down to a bunch of matrices multiplications.
- fooker 29d ago
  > bunch of matrices multiplications What these matrix multiplications are doing is approximately solving pretty high order differential equations. The approximation is not very analog, sure. But neither is nature.
- atemerev 28d ago
  A human brain is about 100T parameters (if you count every synapse) on fp4 quantization (the amount of state information available in every synapse). The architecture is quite different from modern LLMs and currently not well enough understood, but _theoretically_ a modern GB300-NVL72 cluster is nearly computationally sufficient to simulate a human brain (with some optimizations - almost certainly is). For state equivalence, we don't need to simulate every chemical reaction in every brain cell.
ecto 29d ago
Things like this are why I come to HN! Cool hack :)
sgt 29d ago
This has to be some of the coolest stuff I've seen on HN in a while. I'm running 3 flies on my desktop right now, all powered by realistic brains.
make_it_sure 29d ago
does it simulate hormones as well?
theodric 29d ago
It's cool and all, but I have real ones in my kitchen, and I'd prefer to keep the computer room free of them if it's all the same to you.
DonHopkins 29d ago
I made a housefly simulator on the Mac once, using a visual programming language called Bounce / Body Electric, developed by Chuck Blanchard at VPL Research, originally used for VR simulations with the DataGlove and Eyephone and a pair of SGI workstations to render each eye. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VPL_Research https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VPL_Research The simulated fly's purpose was to annoy the simulations of Rush Limbaugh and Jesse Jackson by landing on their heads, who were watching TV and arguing about the closed caption stream. I wrote to Jaron Lanier about it 27 years ago: At 12:31 AM -0400 7/8/99, Hopkins, Don wrote: Hi, Jaron. We've met briefly once or twice - I'm a friend of David Levitt's. What's this about Sun acquiring the rights to the VPL patents, and Body Electric? Jaron Lanier's VPL and Body Electric page: https://web.archive.org/web/20051217153424/http://www.advanced.org/jaron/vpl.html https://web.archive.org/web/20051217153424/http://www.advanc... >VPL had problems maintaining quality in our hardware- though I still sometimes find our headmounts and gloves in use. But our software was really great and can still offer a lot. A challenge to VRML people: Don't you DARE turn out more VR tools that aren't at least as good as this old stuff! Does Sun actually have the Body Electric source code? What version do they have? Does anybody at Sun even know how to compile a Mac program? Last time I worked there (admittedly a long time ago), they were too embarrassed to allow Macs in the building (which might make somebody realize how bad Unix sucks in comparison). Has anyone tried to rewrite it in Java? When I was working with David at Levity and Interval, I totally overhauled the source code to Bounce: porting it to the latest version of CodeWarrior and the PowerPC, cleaning up C code translated from Pascal, that no human had ever touched before, and just generally re-indenting and adding white space so it was pretty to look at. Then I implemented a new interface for plugging in DM's, based on ActiveX (yes, ActiveX runs on the Mac). I added a new data type that you can flow along blue wires: a COM object (aka a plug-in ActiveX object in a shared library). Then we made plug-ins modules that produced and consumed the new plug-in data types, like strings and polymorphic dictionaries. With these new data types, we were able to model very complex simulations as nested trees of dictionaries, strings and numbers, treat dictionaries as high level objects, pass them all around on wires, reading and modifying them at will. The thing that the original Body Electric was missing is a way to dynamically model structured data like Lisp s-expressions and association lists, which is now possible in Bounce, using dictionaries. (The swivel3d trees just don't cut it for representing "knowledge".) Bounce still had the "M4" Director player rendering engine, but it didn't do everything we needed, so I implemented my own graphics library for drawing sprites, playing sounds, and stuff like that. We used it to implement a simulation of Rush Limbaugh and Jesse Jackson watching TV and arguing over the closed captioning stream. A big fat housefly would skitter around the screen, land on their faces, and tickle them into waving their hands around and pontificating. I just got a 400 mhz G3 powerbook, and fired up a 2 year old copy of Bounce and the crazy Limbaugh/Jackson demo, and it still works, actually like a bat out of hell! I ran into David and John Szinger (another Bounce programmer from Interval) a few days ago at a 4th of July party, and they really got a kick out of seeing the old demo that we worked together on, still running! I live in Oakland just south of Berkeley. Drop me a line if you're in the bay area, and would like to see what Bounce has evolved into. -Don From: Jaron Lanier To: Don Hopkins Sent: Thursday, July 08, 1999 6:13 AM Subject: Re: Body Electric lives? Hey there, and thanks for writing! Yup, Sun owns VPL and Body Electric, and my guess is that if anyone looked very closely it would turn out Interval doesn't have rights to Bounce. But no one is likely to look very closely, so let's forget about that. (I don't think Sun is aware of Bounce or the work at Interval.) I had never asked what was done with Bounce at Interval- it's fascinating to hear what you were up to. I live in NYC for the most part, but I'd love to see it sometime when I'm in the Bay Area. Also Chuck Blanchard lives in SF and you and he might want to trade demos sometime. There IS a community of Body Electric users. It is STILL building the most interactive 3D virtual worlds of any tool (though Alice, from Carnegie Mellon, is the other hot contender). That's SHAMEFUL! While BE sucks in every other way, all the more recent vr design tools, especially the vrml ones, simply avoid the problem of deep interactivity. How could the community be so whimpy, at this late date? On the Body Electric side of things, there has also been some work updating to CodeWarrior/PowerPC (shame we didn't share that work!), as well as support for Quickdraw3D, OpenGL on the Mac, OMS, and some other standards. There have been some changes to the interface, but not as ambitious as yours. The neatest thing is a debugger/tracer tool that is a pleasure to use. Since BE is used mostly in 3D domain, there are also some tools dealing with textures, lights, etc. I had always thought the swivel tree was ridiculous, of course, but on the other hand I liked the idea that the virtual world and the knowledge base were the same thing- that unity encourages the visibility and grabbability of the underlying concepts. I think the brain works that way- there isn't some barrier behind which everything gets abstract- instead, it's user interface all the way to the bottom! What I think would be the coolest long-term destination of BE would be extending the scenegraph so that it was as powerful a knowledge base as you'd want... I'd LOVE to see a fancy BE release, in JAVA, or at least spitting JAVA out. The question, of course, is where the money would come from. I've tried to talk Sun into an open source release so the community could hack on it voluntarily (the source was included in the patents that were granted, so it's actually already released by the US government anyway, though only on paper). Unfortunately, Sun doesn't want to do that. What they've said instead is that I can choose up to six sites with free hacking privileges at a given time. Bizarre! With so few sites, I think there'd need to be money to make sure the sites stayed focused on it... You'd have thought Sun would know better by now. The body electric community is surprisingly NOT entertainment oriented, though I and a few others still use it that way. There are people hidden away who are still using it for ergonomic simulations, simple surgical planners (because the fancy systems are too rigid to model some situations), cognitive test rigs, and some work with kids. You should know there was some tension about BE/Bounce at one point. The problem was that Chuck Blanchard wasn't credited as the lead designer/programmer of BE/Bounce when David brought the program to Interval. Chuck's name was reduced in stature in the "about" and he was not mentioned in some important semi-public demos at Interval. He was also offered a pseudo-position to help with Bounce at Interval, but without health benefits - and Chuck has MS and absolutely NEEDS health insurance. I at one point yelled at the guy who runs Interval (forgot his name..) about their treatment of Chuck- and David is STILL mad at me for making a fuss about it. But I felt I had to. So that's the scoop! Both sides of the mystery revealed! All the best, Jaron Homepage of Jaron Lanier: https://web.archive.org/web/20050212085044/http://www.advanced.org/jaron/ https://web.archive.org/web/20050212085044/http://www.advanc... Here are three goals for "good VR" from David Levitt, with whom I work at Pantomime Corporation, and who used to work on VR at VPL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8023893 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8023893
neuraldenis 29d ago
Hi, im the author of this repo, thank you for posting here!
- t00 29d ago
  Is there a chance for a Linux version?
  - eMPee584 28d ago
    Someone did a port already: https://github.com/lubabs770/gnat https://github.com/lubabs770/gnat
    - thomastjeffery 28d ago
      Seems to be designed for hyprland?
jochak 29d ago
quite interesting, very small neural nets mimicking the brain of a fruit fly
WithinReason 29d ago
Related (fictional): https://qntm.org/mmacevedo https://qntm.org/mmacevedo MMAcevedo (Mnemonic Map/Acevedo), also known as Miguel, is the earliest executable image of a human brain. It is a snapshot of the living brain of neurology graduate Miguel Acevedo Álvarez (2010–2073), taken by researchers at the Uplift Laboratory at the University of New Mexico on August 1, 2031
- jamesbvaughan 29d ago
  That's a great one. It also made me think of Neal Stephenson's _Fall_.
- qrios 28d ago
  Fun story, thnx for sharing! The most amazing thing about it is probably not the “upload” itself, but the lossless compression ratio of approximately 150,000. > "… outright revolt begins within another 100 subjective hours." No wonder: the brain has to work a third of the time, with no weekends and no beer on Friday nights.
emsign 29d ago
Fall; or, Dodge in Hell comes to mind
fenestella 29d ago
[flagged]
dan-bailey 29d ago
Do they have a variant for visionOS so we can have it flying around in the 3D AR space around us? Because that would be even more awful.
- brookst 29d ago
  M5 AVP could probably render thousands of them in realtime
Bengalilol 29d ago
A simple video showcasing one fruit picture opened in Preview with the fly going for it would have been nice.
qqrun 28d ago
I like it haha
barrystaes 27d ago
Nice story, but where is the video demo for DesktopFly ? The only existing Youtube videos are Shorts made using AI recap crap. Recapping an AI written readme.. go figure. I'll have my AI read this for me.

383 points by phoenix120 29d ago

actionfromafar 29d ago

Now this is real AI.

bitwize 29d ago
This is straight up ghost-dubbing.
naikrovek 29d ago
[dead]

uniq7 29d ago

No demo video?

davidkwast 29d ago
I just found this video on YouTube now: https://youtu.be/A8fDr7Rr7yM?is=cHwOQVrli9oXLdqY https://youtu.be/A8fDr7Rr7yM?is=cHwOQVrli9oXLdqY
- hmokiguess 29d ago
  Open to see what it was about, stayed for the banger soundtrack
- yreg 29d ago
  That doesn't show this project.
tedd4u 29d ago
FYI it takes less than 30 seconds do clone, build, and run.
- UltraSane 29d ago
  If you have a mac. I don't.
- asimovDev 29d ago
  it would've taken the similar amount of time for the OP to do a 10 second screen recording and paste it into the project root to be linkable from the README.md and it would avoid thousands of people having to waste compute cycles and electricity and 30 seconds of their lives cloning and building , wouldn't it?

aperrien 29d ago

Interesting work! There's NeuroMechFly (https://github.com/NeLy-EPFL/flygym/ https://github.com/NeLy-EPFL/flygym/) available, you might try using that to simulate the fly body in real time as well.

pavel_lishin 29d ago

Ah, Mr. Acevedo, nice to see you.

a1o 29d ago

> What's modeled vs. measured > Honesty section: I wouldn’t mind an human written README

vhantz 29d ago
> live *spiking* simulation
dag11 29d ago
> runs as a 1 kHz leaky-integrate-and-fire (LIF) simulation That hyphenated thing is always such a give. Clearly a thing discussed in the Claude conversation, made its way into the plan, then the readme. It always creates hyphenated phrases out of things it feels are core requirements. I'm actually over caring about Claude's obsession with the concepts of "real", "honest", and "rather than". What annoys me the most now is how every single sentence, bullet, etc that even makes its way into the products it builds are advertisements for itself. Product settings pages now read like ads, or like something written by a student begging for extra credit from the teacher. You can't unsee it!
- etienne89 29d ago
  To be fair, as a term it has always been written as "Integrate-and-Fire" neuron model. In this case correct would be "Leaky Integrate-and-Fire" but that is nitpicking. Resources that outdate ChatGPT: - W. Gerstner "Neuronal Dynamics" (2014): https://neuronaldynamics.epfl.ch/online/Ch1.S3.html https://neuronaldynamics.epfl.ch/online/Ch1.S3.html - E. Izhikevich "Which model to use for cortical spiking neurons?" (2004): https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/1333071 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/1333071
rossy 29d ago
> Honesty section: This one gets to me. Not only is it useless (paragraph would have the same meaning if it was removed) but wdym "honesty section," Claude? The whole readme should be honest! One of the many causes of psychological damage when reading AI-generated technical writing is the reminder that one of its tics is that declares when it's being honest or real, casting doubt on the rest.

causal 29d ago

I appreciate the open source approach over the startup's sensational claims. This is more transparent. That said, I think it still presents itself as if the fly is being controlled by the connectome, when (if I'm reading the source correctly) it's more accurate to say scripted behaviors have been hooked up to be triggered by the connectome. Put another way, you might as well have the "escape" trigger open a YouTube video of a fly flying away. That would probably be less misleading too.

ramraj07 29d ago
I would argue that this is pretty disingenuous (as is most connectomics research I suppose) since its implying we have a fully wired connectome of the fly thats actually meaningful.
- squibonpig 29d ago
  Why isn't it and what do they have? I'm not really informed on this stuff.
  - melagonster 29d ago
    We only know which neurons are connected, not the weights.
    - solid_fuel 29d ago
      More than that, real neurons don’t behave anything like the ones we model in neural networks - real ones signal with pulses, in a manner where the timing seems as significant as the magnitude of the impulse. Typically simulated neural networks use continuous analog values instead of pulses and a sigmoid function to shape the output. Basically, the “wiring” might be the same but nothing beyond that is. - - - Actually, I may have spoken too soon. Looking over the code this does look like it implements spikey activation, which is more similar to living neurons. You are correct they don’t have the original weights though - in as much as the concept maps to biology. I am curious if this has a way to dynamically modify the weights as it runs - I consider that a major missing gap between real brains and computer simulated neural networks.

logicallee 29d ago

This is absolutely astounding. What an implementation. A connectome is like a full brain scan! I am asking Claude to port this to the browser and I'll host it, so you can try it without installing anything. Some details about the port: Claude is able to do porting tasks like this. I'll put up a link when you can try it in your browser. I was able to get it to port the complete BitNet b1.58 2-billion parameter model several versions ago (in February, so this would have been Opus 4.5) to browser, so it can do so. This will run on the browser. I'll have it make it so that on mobile you can tap the fly or turn on the camera and it sees you, and same on desktop actually. Since the connectome is only 668 neurons, this will run super fast. Actually I'll make it allow for several flies, and let you drop food. I did something like this before here[1] but using the real connectome is something very different and very amazing. I'll have it add an experimental 3D mode with threejs, I'm not sure if that is also possible or not, we'll have to see it. This size of task usually takes Claude a few hours, so check my comment in the morning for the implementation, I'll reply here once it's done and hosted. [1] https://stateofutopia.com/papers/1/evolving-brains-cull-long-inference-times.html https://stateofutopia.com/papers/1/evolving-brains-cull-long...

mapontosevenths 29d ago
It's pretty amazing stuff! I was very excited the first time I saw a connectome as well. Years ago I managed to get most of openworm running and connected to some Lego Mindstorms to let the worm roll around my house. I'm not even sure the connectome was finished at that time. Honestly, I barely had any idea what I was doing and we didn't have AI tools so I was never really sure what I wired to what. I did manage to hook... something to the ultrasound sensor and... another thing to the wheels so that when the sensor was triggered it would back up. What blew my mind was the realization that these weird hybrid critters were probably the first true immortals. Now that we have a full connectome, who will bother with another? Students will probably just keep instantiating copies of this one to tinker with forever.
- logicallee 29d ago
  I can't imagine why people hate my comment so much (4 downvotes), when I linked an existing fruitfly project I already did, and Claude is working on what I wrote now, just as I wrote. Maybe people thought I was being sarcastic when I wrote "A connectome is like a full brain scan!" but I wrote that since maybe not everyone knows what a connectome means.

DaiPlusPlus 29d ago

I have no exposure to connectomes - or really anything quite like this (as opposed to good ol’ fashioned perceptrons) - so forgive my following uninformed question: Can someone explain if this software is ethical?

deleted 29d ago
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ramraj07 29d ago
Why do you think it wont be?
- twothreeone 29d ago
  Well, one obvious question is if the simulated brain experiences pain, or more generally can it suffer? And if so, how would we tell.
  - fluoridation 29d ago
    What does "suffering" mean? Define your boolean function, apply it to the state of the program, and you'll know if the program is currently suffering.
  - logicallee 29d ago
    I've ported it to the browser and connected a squash functionality behind an ethical guardrail (you have to lift a cover to engage this functionality). need to iterate on the ui but will share it soon. you can squash the bug and cause it real pain. it also sees you if you turn your camera on and reacts to your movements. this is all wired up and I'll post it shortly.
    - DaiPlusPlus 29d ago
      I can’t tell if you’re a talented comedian - or if you should be assessed for sociopathy.

deleted 29d ago

[deleted]

kypro 29d ago

Oh nice, might use this to create some art for my home. https://www.instagram.com/p/DMfi-9Vsl-u/ https://www.instagram.com/p/DMfi-9Vsl-u/ > Infinite Pain is a computer running a deterministic neural simulation of a microscopic nematode worm’s brain (c. elegans), subjected to regular pain stimuli.

ddlsmurf 29d ago
are you ok ?
- kypro 28d ago
  Not really. I'm deeply disturbed by this kind of thing and our flippant approach to this technology. I'm trying to prompt an emotion reaction and reflection on that. If I'm serious, then how does it make you feel? Should I or anyone be creating art experiments like this? Or what if I just want to play around with this technology, should anyone be allowed to run neural simulations of any creature to satisfy my own curiosity? Even if you didn't like what I was doing and wanted to stop me, could you? Could anyone? It's worth thinking about. AI and progress in neuroscience and computational power should allow me to create a whole exhibit in my home of human neural simulations. Maybe god doesn't exist, or maybe he didn't create hell. But one day, perhaps soon, we humans will.
  - ddlsmurf 28d ago
    Those are good points. And for a serious answer, indeed we should probably be exploring the ethics of it now. It's just humanity never really did that before unleashing a new tech, so I'm not optimistic, but I wish you success on provoking reflexion. What you're doing now isn't bothering me really but only for a reason of scale, it's one of those balancing dilemnas like abortion, or "is it a pet or food". Ian M Banks' Surface Detail has a harrowing vision of the prolongation of what you're doing (I'm a huge fan). At the moment I'm more disturbed about stuff like those people who played doom on cells.
    - kypro 28d ago

_def 29d ago

next up: https://openworm.org/ https://openworm.org/

dekhn 29d ago

It's weird to write MacOS specific software in this era.

bigyabai 29d ago
The unstoppable "rewrite it in Swift!" vs the insurmountable "where's the Windows version?"
MBCook 29d ago
Why? If I was writing this I would write it for my OS. Why would I write it for anything else? I assume that’s what the author did.
bashZorina_09 29d ago
Is it? I'm observing the largest tech companies in the world release macOS/iOS-first or only, and consequently supports said version the best in this era.
asimovDev 29d ago
do you mean they should've spent more time writing for other platforms or do you insinuate that they should've shipped a chromium browser instead of writing native software?
- dekhn 29d ago
  The former, although the latter (or simply making a web app) is also a legitimate solution.
DonHopkins 29d ago
You've curiously left out which platform it's not weird to write software for. Is there only one platform that's not weird, or is MacOS the only weird platform? Some of the best platforms and software are weird. Get over it.
- dekhn 29d ago
  I write applications that run the same on all three main desktop platforms (typically): Mac, Windows, Linux. Writing an app for any single desktop platform is weird, unless the application uses some sort of specific functionality of that platform. In my case, I use Qt, but I've also written applications which had three UI drivers (X11/Win32/MacOS).

qingcharles 29d ago

At some point in the future would it be possible to simply download a DNA sequence of an entire animal as a "ROM" and boot it into a virtual "reality"? What detail level of reality would we have to emulate for an egg to grow into an adult animal?

Leynos 29d ago
To give you a sense of the computation needed, a spatiotemporal physics simulation of a minimal (493 gene) bacterium's full 105 minute cellular cycle took 4-6 days of GPU hours on two A100s. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0092867426001741 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S009286742... Compare this with a c elegens nematode: ~20000 protein coding genes and 959 cells, with all the extra machinery you'll find in a eukaryotic cell. I'm reading this as both a question of raw simulation surface and combinatorics.
- fooker 29d ago
  We'd need analog solutions for this simulations, and slowly these solutions will start to resemble biology in a dystopian way.
- atemerev 28d ago
  Depends on the simulation level. A lot of things can be abstracted away, we don't need to simulate everything down to atomic level.

myshapeprotocol 29d ago

[dead]

lp4v4n 29d ago

Would we be able to have a "digital human" when we reach the level of creating this kind of brain mapping for the human brain? Honestly I think we're still discovering how powerful neural networks are and certainly they can do computations that sound very close to intelligence in some contexts, but I still find it hard to think that we can simplify the whole reality of an incredibly complex chemical machinery down to a bunch of matrices multiplications.

fooker 29d ago
> bunch of matrices multiplications What these matrix multiplications are doing is approximately solving pretty high order differential equations. The approximation is not very analog, sure. But neither is nature.
atemerev 28d ago
A human brain is about 100T parameters (if you count every synapse) on fp4 quantization (the amount of state information available in every synapse). The architecture is quite different from modern LLMs and currently not well enough understood, but _theoretically_ a modern GB300-NVL72 cluster is nearly computationally sufficient to simulate a human brain (with some optimizations - almost certainly is). For state equivalence, we don't need to simulate every chemical reaction in every brain cell.

ecto 29d ago

Things like this are why I come to HN! Cool hack :)

sgt 29d ago

This has to be some of the coolest stuff I've seen on HN in a while. I'm running 3 flies on my desktop right now, all powered by realistic brains.

make_it_sure 29d ago

does it simulate hormones as well?

theodric 29d ago

It's cool and all, but I have real ones in my kitchen, and I'd prefer to keep the computer room free of them if it's all the same to you.

DonHopkins 29d ago

I made a housefly simulator on the Mac once, using a visual programming language called Bounce / Body Electric, developed by Chuck Blanchard at VPL Research, originally used for VR simulations with the DataGlove and Eyephone and a pair of SGI workstations to render each eye. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VPL_Research https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VPL_Research The simulated fly's purpose was to annoy the simulations of Rush Limbaugh and Jesse Jackson by landing on their heads, who were watching TV and arguing about the closed caption stream. I wrote to Jaron Lanier about it 27 years ago: At 12:31 AM -0400 7/8/99, Hopkins, Don wrote: Hi, Jaron. We've met briefly once or twice - I'm a friend of David Levitt's. What's this about Sun acquiring the rights to the VPL patents, and Body Electric? Jaron Lanier's VPL and Body Electric page: https://web.archive.org/web/20051217153424/http://www.advanced.org/jaron/vpl.html https://web.archive.org/web/20051217153424/http://www.advanc... >VPL had problems maintaining quality in our hardware- though I still sometimes find our headmounts and gloves in use. But our software was really great and can still offer a lot. A challenge to VRML people: Don't you DARE turn out more VR tools that aren't at least as good as this old stuff! Does Sun actually have the Body Electric source code? What version do they have? Does anybody at Sun even know how to compile a Mac program? Last time I worked there (admittedly a long time ago), they were too embarrassed to allow Macs in the building (which might make somebody realize how bad Unix sucks in comparison). Has anyone tried to rewrite it in Java? When I was working with David at Levity and Interval, I totally overhauled the source code to Bounce: porting it to the latest version of CodeWarrior and the PowerPC, cleaning up C code translated from Pascal, that no human had ever touched before, and just generally re-indenting and adding white space so it was pretty to look at. Then I implemented a new interface for plugging in DM's, based on ActiveX (yes, ActiveX runs on the Mac). I added a new data type that you can flow along blue wires: a COM object (aka a plug-in ActiveX object in a shared library). Then we made plug-ins modules that produced and consumed the new plug-in data types, like strings and polymorphic dictionaries. With these new data types, we were able to model very complex simulations as nested trees of dictionaries, strings and numbers, treat dictionaries as high level objects, pass them all around on wires, reading and modifying them at will. The thing that the original Body Electric was missing is a way to dynamically model structured data like Lisp s-expressions and association lists, which is now possible in Bounce, using dictionaries. (The swivel3d trees just don't cut it for representing "knowledge".) Bounce still had the "M4" Director player rendering engine, but it didn't do everything we needed, so I implemented my own graphics library for drawing sprites, playing sounds, and stuff like that. We used it to implement a simulation of Rush Limbaugh and Jesse Jackson watching TV and arguing over the closed captioning stream. A big fat housefly would skitter around the screen, land on their faces, and tickle them into waving their hands around and pontificating. I just got a 400 mhz G3 powerbook, and fired up a 2 year old copy of Bounce and the crazy Limbaugh/Jackson demo, and it still works, actually like a bat out of hell! I ran into David and John Szinger (another Bounce programmer from Interval) a few days ago at a 4th of July party, and they really got a kick out of seeing the old demo that we worked together on, still running! I live in Oakland just south of Berkeley. Drop me a line if you're in the bay area, and would like to see what Bounce has evolved into. -Don From: Jaron Lanier To: Don Hopkins Sent: Thursday, July 08, 1999 6:13 AM Subject: Re: Body Electric lives? Hey there, and thanks for writing! Yup, Sun owns VPL and Body Electric, and my guess is that if anyone looked very closely it would turn out Interval doesn't have rights to Bounce. But no one is likely to look very closely, so let's forget about that. (I don't think Sun is aware of Bounce or the work at Interval.) I had never asked what was done with Bounce at Interval- it's fascinating to hear what you were up to. I live in NYC for the most part, but I'd love to see it sometime when I'm in the Bay Area. Also Chuck Blanchard lives in SF and you and he might want to trade demos sometime. There IS a community of Body Electric users. It is STILL building the most interactive 3D virtual worlds of any tool (though Alice, from Carnegie Mellon, is the other hot contender). That's SHAMEFUL! While BE sucks in every other way, all the more recent vr design tools, especially the vrml ones, simply avoid the problem of deep interactivity. How could the community be so whimpy, at this late date? On the Body Electric side of things, there has also been some work updating to CodeWarrior/PowerPC (shame we didn't share that work!), as well as support for Quickdraw3D, OpenGL on the Mac, OMS, and some other standards. There have been some changes to the interface, but not as ambitious as yours. The neatest thing is a debugger/tracer tool that is a pleasure to use. Since BE is used mostly in 3D domain, there are also some tools dealing with textures, lights, etc. I had always thought the swivel tree was ridiculous, of course, but on the other hand I liked the idea that the virtual world and the knowledge base were the same thing- that unity encourages the visibility and grabbability of the underlying concepts. I think the brain works that way- there isn't some barrier behind which everything gets abstract- instead, it's user interface all the way to the bottom! What I think would be the coolest long-term destination of BE would be extending the scenegraph so that it was as powerful a knowledge base as you'd want... I'd LOVE to see a fancy BE release, in JAVA, or at least spitting JAVA out. The question, of course, is where the money would come from. I've tried to talk Sun into an open source release so the community could hack on it voluntarily (the source was included in the patents that were granted, so it's actually already released by the US government anyway, though only on paper). Unfortunately, Sun doesn't want to do that. What they've said instead is that I can choose up to six sites with free hacking privileges at a given time. Bizarre! With so few sites, I think there'd need to be money to make sure the sites stayed focused on it... You'd have thought Sun would know better by now. The body electric community is surprisingly NOT entertainment oriented, though I and a few others still use it that way. There are people hidden away who are still using it for ergonomic simulations, simple surgical planners (because the fancy systems are too rigid to model some situations), cognitive test rigs, and some work with kids. You should know there was some tension about BE/Bounce at one point. The problem was that Chuck Blanchard wasn't credited as the lead designer/programmer of BE/Bounce when David brought the program to Interval. Chuck's name was reduced in stature in the "about" and he was not mentioned in some important semi-public demos at Interval. He was also offered a pseudo-position to help with Bounce at Interval, but without health benefits - and Chuck has MS and absolutely NEEDS health insurance. I at one point yelled at the guy who runs Interval (forgot his name..) about their treatment of Chuck- and David is STILL mad at me for making a fuss about it. But I felt I had to. So that's the scoop! Both sides of the mystery revealed! All the best, Jaron Homepage of Jaron Lanier: https://web.archive.org/web/20050212085044/http://www.advanced.org/jaron/ https://web.archive.org/web/20050212085044/http://www.advanc... Here are three goals for "good VR" from David Levitt, with whom I work at Pantomime Corporation, and who used to work on VR at VPL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8023893 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8023893

neuraldenis 29d ago

Hi, im the author of this repo, thank you for posting here!

t00 29d ago
Is there a chance for a Linux version?
- eMPee584 28d ago
  Someone did a port already: https://github.com/lubabs770/gnat https://github.com/lubabs770/gnat
  - thomastjeffery 28d ago
    Seems to be designed for hyprland?

jochak 29d ago

quite interesting, very small neural nets mimicking the brain of a fruit fly

WithinReason 29d ago

Related (fictional): https://qntm.org/mmacevedo https://qntm.org/mmacevedo MMAcevedo (Mnemonic Map/Acevedo), also known as Miguel, is the earliest executable image of a human brain. It is a snapshot of the living brain of neurology graduate Miguel Acevedo Álvarez (2010–2073), taken by researchers at the Uplift Laboratory at the University of New Mexico on August 1, 2031

jamesbvaughan 29d ago
That's a great one. It also made me think of Neal Stephenson's _Fall_.
qrios 28d ago
Fun story, thnx for sharing! The most amazing thing about it is probably not the “upload” itself, but the lossless compression ratio of approximately 150,000. > "… outright revolt begins within another 100 subjective hours." No wonder: the brain has to work a third of the time, with no weekends and no beer on Friday nights.

emsign 29d ago

Fall; or, Dodge in Hell comes to mind

fenestella 29d ago

[flagged]

dan-bailey 29d ago

Do they have a variant for visionOS so we can have it flying around in the 3D AR space around us? Because that would be even more awful.

brookst 29d ago
M5 AVP could probably render thousands of them in realtime

Bengalilol 29d ago

A simple video showcasing one fruit picture opened in Preview with the fly going for it would have been nice.

qqrun 28d ago

I like it haha

barrystaes 27d ago

Nice story, but where is the video demo for DesktopFly ? The only existing Youtube videos are Shorts made using AI recap crap. Recapping an AI written readme.. go figure. I'll have my AI read this for me.