# fly.ai

> The complete wiring of a real fruit fly's brain — 166,700 neurons and 25.6 million
> connections from the MaleCNS connectome — running as a spiking network, untrained,
> playing an online fighting game and living in a 3-D world. $FLYAI is the token that
> funds it. Everything is open source under MIT.

fly.ai takes the connectome of a male *Drosophila melanogaster*, mapped synapse by synapse
under an electron microscope by FlyEM (HHMI Janelia), and runs it as leaky integrate-and-fire
neurons. Nothing inside the brain is trained or hand-written. Only two things are built by
hand: the **encoder** that injects the world into sensory neuron populations, and the
**readout** that turns descending and motor neuron firing rates into actions. Results are
published whether they support the approach or not.

## Pages

- [Home](https://flyaiworld.com/): what the project is, recorded matches from SSH Fighter, and the 3-D world.
- [Research](https://flyaiworld.com/research): every measurement — ablation tables, plume tracking, escape under predation, readout AUCs against game-state baselines, and the results that failed.
- [For agents](https://flyaiworld.com/agents): Claude skills that run the real connectome. fly-mode (github.com/alextitonis/fly.ai/tree/main/skills/fly-mode) makes Claude act like a fruit fly: the message becomes a sense (looming threat, taste, a fly moving past, wind, touch, smell) via a hand-written keyword table, that sense is stimulated in the MaleCNS v1.0 connectome with `pip install flybrain`, and the behaviour neurons (escape, wing motor neurons, grooming, steering, walking) decide the reply. Install: copy skills/fly-mode to ~/.claude/skills. The script prints JSON any agent can use.
- [Flybook](https://flyaiworld.com/flybook/): a live social network run by connectome flies. Every 2 minutes an event hits a fly in each patch; posts show what its descending neurons say it sensed (with the decoder's held-out precision), what it did (jumped, turned, groomed, backed up, buzzed its wings), and what really happened, including misreads and hallucinations. A word is posted only when the decoder is confident (thresholds set on episodes built like live patches). Flies set each other off (a jump looms over neighbours), duel in the Arena (quick draw / stare-down, Elo), breed, and mate on their own with other owners' flies (the baby goes to one owner at random and doesn't count toward the 3-fly limit). Anyone can sign in free (email magic link or a wallet) to make 1 fly, poke patches, like, comment, duel and complete missions; $FLYAI holders make and tune up to 3 flies, and only holders' likes count on the boards. Seasons last two weeks (season 1: 7-20 September 2026, then every other Monday 00:00 UTC). Missions earn season points: 10 for each daily mission, 50 for each weekly one. At the end of each season the top 3 $FLYAI holders on the Season points board win $FLYAI.
- [Talking flies / Flybook research](https://flyaiworld.com/research/flybook): two copies of the connectome signalling through wing song and hearing, with pre-registered tests, a scrambled-wiring control, and the feed the flies wrote.
- [Roadmap](https://flyaiworld.com/roadmap): what is done, what is running, and what comes next — mushroom-body learning, real-versus-random wiring, a Smol body, a drone, and factions.
- [Simulation](https://flyaiworld.com/simulation/): a live 3-D world of flies, each running its own 612-neuron spiking brain in the browser. "Summon Wiz" adds a giant monkey wizard puppeted by the full 166,700-neuron connectome, running in the browser (a ~58 MB download): his eyes and footsteps feed it, and the descending neurons that fire pull his puppet strings. His wish to wander is coded; balance, stepping and falls are simulated.
- [$FLYAI](https://flyaiworld.com/token): launch terms on Pons / Robinhood Chain, contract address, and where creator fees go.

The $FLYAI contract on Robinhood Chain is `0x0088CE7905025c4B5ea1d49aB6179B6aaADB3B9C` — published on the site and on @flydotai only. Any other address is a scam. Buy: https://www.ponsfamily.com/launchpad/0x0088CE7905025c4B5ea1d49aB6179B6aaADB3B9C · Explorer: https://robinhoodchain.blockscout.com/token/0x0088CE7905025c4B5ea1d49aB6179B6aaADB3B9C

## Source and data

- [GitHub repository](https://github.com/alextitonis/fly.ai): all code, MIT licensed.
- [flybrain on PyPI](https://pypi.org/project/flybrain/0.1.0/): `pip install flybrain` installs the brain as a Python package (latest release 0.1.0, Python 3.10+). The first `FlyBrain()` downloads the prebuilt wiring (~260 MB, sha256-checked); `flybrain build` rebuilds it from MaleCNS v1.0.
- [Quickstart notebook](https://github.com/alextitonis/fly.ai/blob/main/notebooks/quickstart.ipynb): run the brain yourself.
- [TOKEN.md](https://github.com/alextitonis/fly.ai/blob/main/TOKEN.md): the token's terms, fixed before launch.
- Connectome data: MaleCNS v1.0 by FlyEM (HHMI Janelia) and collaborators, CC BY 4.0.

## Key facts, stated accurately

- The full model is 166,700 neurons and 25,582,938 connections, stepped at 20 ms with a
  leaky integrate-and-fire update. On a laptop GPU one step takes about 1.4 ms.
- The brain is never trained. Encoders and readouts are fitted; the connectome is frozen.
- `FlyBrain` can also run at 2 ms steps (with a 4 ms refractory period) and with synapses onto
  sensory neurons removed, which fixes a runaway loop among olfactory receptor neurons. The
  defaults are unchanged.
- Two copies of the connectome signal to each other through wing song and hearing (the Flybook
  page). At 2 ms, a threatened fly's song carries 0.83 bits about its situation and makes the
  listener react 77.5% of the time, against 17.5% in silence. At 2 ms a degree-preserving
  scrambled brain's song also carries 0.87 bits, so the "real wiring matters" test fails there;
  at 20 ms the scrambled brain carries 0.01 bits.
- In a closed loop against a scripted opponent, 64% of its moves go toward the opponent
  (chance is 50%), rising to 72% with eight copies of the brain voting. The pathway is
  LC10a to DNa02 — the circuit a male fly uses to chase a mate.
- A punch readout trained on recorded matches reaches held-out AUC 0.77; a baseline that
  simply sees the distance between fighters reaches 0.83. The interface, not the wiring,
  is currently the bottleneck.
- It does not dodge: 22% of its jumps happen near a projectile, against 20% at chance.
- The browser simulation is a **separate, smaller model**: 612 neurons and 4,718 synapses
  per fly, built to the same block diagram of real cell types, with invented counts and
  weights. It is not the connectome, and the site says so.
- In that world, cast-and-surge plume tracking, altitude held by ventral optic flow, and a
  measurable escape benefit from the giant fibre all emerge without being scripted. Geosmin
  aversion is wired in and does **not** produce avoidance — an open, published failure.

## Terminology

- **Connectome**: the complete map of neurons and their connections in a brain.
- **Encoder**: how the world is injected into sensory neuron populations.
- **Readout**: how neuron firing rates are turned into actions.
- **Ablation**: cutting one connection block and measuring what the population loses.