Evan Smith, a graduate student at Georgia Institute of Technology, successfully integrated MaleCNS v1.0, the first complete male fruit fly central nervous system connectome, completed over a decade by HHMI Janelia, the University of Cambridge, and Google Research, into the game Minecraft in less than a week using GPT-6 Astra technology. This achievement enabled virtual fruit fly flight driven by simulated neural activity from 166,700 neurons. The connectome contains 125 million synapses, covering the fruit fly's central brain, optic lobes, and ventral nerve cord, and reveals male-specific and sexually dimorphic cell types, with all data fully open-source. Transitioning from a static brain atlas to a dynamic virtual fruit fly required addressing three key components: neuronal dynamics, sensory input, and motor output. This breakthrough has lowered the barrier to whole-brain simulation to the level of personal projects, significantly reducing the required resources compared to previous similar projects. Currently, the virtual fruit fly can only drive behavior through neural activity, and it remains unclear whether it possesses consciousness. However, this open-source project provides ordinary researchers with a new way to explore related fields.
