Fly plays Super Mario

A real fruit fly connectome plays Super Mario Bros.

The brain is MaleCNS v1.0 — the complete wiring diagram of an adult male fruit fly's central nervous system (166,700 neurons, 25.6 million synapses), published by HHMI Janelia and Google Research on September 3, 2026. It runs as a fixed leaky-integrate-and-fire spiking network: game pixels drive its real visual neurons, and a few of its real descending motor neurons (DNg100, DNa02/DNg13, DNp01/DNp10) are read out as NES controller buttons. No training, no reward, no learning. It runs at real NES speed (60 fps) on one CPU core of a laptop.

This page is a recorded 60-second run: one video of the game and the brain's live activity, with the controller overlay driven by the recorded button presses.

Developed with 💙 by Kaarel Kaarelson. Mario icon by Icons8.