Google's mapped fly brain is now playing Doom and Beat Saber

Google published the first complete map of a male adult fruit fly's brain last week — and within days, software engineers had it playing Doom and Beat Saber. The connectome, called MaleCNS v1.0, took years of work and AI assistance to compile and was made freely available for download.

Coinbase engineer Alex Wormuth was first out of the gate, announcing he was training the fly brain to play Doom using the full connectome. He published a live video feed of the simulation's progress — the fly has played thousands of runs and is, by his own account, still not doing great. Shortly after, an engineer going by domi on Bluesky got the same brain model playing Beat Saber, with a little fly avatar waving lightsabers and slicing through tiles. Domi also wired it up to play shooters more broadly, using the fly's neural circuitry to determine when to turn and its courtship song signals to decide when to fire. "The more aroused the fly is the harder it tries to shoot," domi noted.

Google had previously mapped the brain of a female adult fruit fly, but the male connectome is a new milestone — and the company noted there are meaningful differences between the two. "It's a big step in advancing neuroscience experiments," Google said of the project, "and promises to be a foundational resource for neuroscience for years to come." The researchers almost certainly did not picture Doom when they wrote that, but here we are.

The gaming community's reaction has been equal parts impressed and amused. Whether the fly brain ever clears a full Doom level remains to be seen, but the experiments are already drawing attention to just how quickly open scientific data gets picked up and repurposed by engineers with a sense of humor.