New and updated fruit fly brain projects

Changelog

1. 6 Oct 2026

   Ninth check: where in the wiring is the turn? "Is it AI?" as a field, download sizes, five browser demos and 5 new entries

   111 entries re-checked on 6 Oct 2026: 4 with new commits, 0 new releases, 0 re-grades, 1 repository still gone; 53 videos re-checked: all available, 0 removed; 5 entries added, 1 video added.

   • Where in the wiring is the turn? (new, made by us, pre-registered, brain only): "We turned the scrambled maps up until they were as busy as the real one. They still did not produce the turn: the wiring, not the amount of activity, makes it." Also "Scrambling only the inside of the map kept about -9% of the turn command and 69% of the escape signal" (−9% means none: the far-side command was absent in all 6 trials) and "With the escape neuron silenced, the turn command stayed" (expected: the map has no giant fibre → DNa02 connections). Caveats with the chart: brain only, 7 drives await body runs, n 6 / 6 / 3 / 6 / 2 per arm, a faster input checked against the 5 Oct one. Chart and caveats
   • Is it AI? A new field, trained_class, on all 116 records: 45 of 83 graded projects have a trained, learning or search-tuned part in their main path. Filter "Trained parts (is it AI?)" on Projects; answer and chart on Is it real?
   • What you download: sizes, checksums, licences and access for 8 releases (403 files), read from the hosts' metadata: the beginner path needs 104.1 MB, FlyWire v783 in full is 10.6 GB, MaleCNS 31.3 GB, BANC 536.1 GB (308.3 GB on request). The FlyWire licence conflict (CC BY 4.0 on Zenodo, CC BY-NC 4.0 on flywire.ai) stays open; we follow the stricter reading. Download facts
   • Browser check: five more demos, all ran: Vial (7.43 MB), Doodle Fly (34.99 MB), Infinite Sugar (36.04 MB), Fly Dino (3.81 MB) and Neural Canvas, which ran but whose ~77 MB brain download was not seen in our check window. Results
   • Controls ledger: 41 studies, 33 with a wiring null: helps 15, no difference 8, worse 2, mixed 7, not yet scored 1. Our looming row now fair and strong by the fixed rules; new: fly tennis and FlyBrain Flappy (helps, weak), Fly-Racer (mixed); corrected: Fly Dino's no-brain baseline is not beaten. No scoring rule changed.
   • Updated records: B Fly-NAF: a new best run, and a hand-written fading memory now drives one side's looming inputs (grade unchanged); flybrain-connectome-benchmark adds a pre-registered partial-silencing sub-study ("no clear change"); download sizes of the 8 dataset entries and of 5 browser demos updated.
   • Is it real?: all 20 verdicts re-checked (13 code unchanged since graded, 7 no code, 0 changed). Gorilla Tag 899,151 views, still U. No claim promoted.
   • 5 new entries. All numbers are the authors' own.
     • A Connectome ping pong (fly tennis): two untrained MaleCNS flies rally a ball; 54 hits against 10 with one shuffled wiring, one match per condition.
     • B FlyBrain · Flappy: Flappy Bird through the FlyWire looming-escape pathway; its controls are author-reported only.
     • C Fly-Racer: a car racer with a PPO-trained MaleCNS steering core.
     • C FlyWire Pong: a 1,230-neuron FlyWire-topology network plays Pong in the browser, trained offline.
     • C Fly VNC Walking Simulation: a nerve-cord model with a body, but motor spikes reach the joints through a random hash.
   • Left out: a repository that repeats open-fly's method. Deferred: a jump-shot game, a credited port of DesktopFly and about 27 small repositories.
   • Video gallery: 54 videos; a Spanish Doom explainer by Vm granmisterio added. Thumbnails unchanged.
   • New on the site: the chart "Where in the wiring is the turn?" with its share card, a census diagram of the looming pathway, the "Is it AI?" chart, a download-size chart and table, a second browser chart on Ways to try, and the field trained_class on For AI agents. Report of the ninth check
2. 5 Oct 2026

   Eighth check: we ran the map. A looming shadow, plain answers to four questions and 4 new entries

   107 entries re-checked on 5 Oct 2026: 7 with new commits, 0 new releases, 0 re-grades, 1 repository still gone; 52 videos re-checked: all available, 0 removed; 4 entries added, 1 video added.

   • We ran the map (new, made by us, pre-registered): a looming shadow on one eye of the Shiu et al. whole-brain model turned our simulated FlyGym fly away in 4 of 4 runs with the real FlyWire wiring and in 0 of 3 with scrambled wiring. fly67's own brain rule was reproduced in our Brian2 run (giant fibre 111.5–120.5 Hz). Caveats shown with the result: one model, open loop, our hand-made mapping, a constant external walking drive, 1 s, not a real fly; small n; much quieter scrambled brains; the direction rests on our mapping and fly67's claim. Chart, brain table and caveats · result card
   • Plain answers on Is it real?: Is it AI?, Is it a brain or just a map?, Can it suffer? (updated) and Can I put it in my game?, each with evidence and an uncertainty line.
   • Build your own: beginner path re-tested 5 Oct 2026 (6 of 6 tests, 82.0 Hz bit-exact); new tested step Add a sense: looming with its exact commands and source.
   • Controls ledger: 38 studies, 30 with a wiring null: helps 13, no difference 8, worse 2, mixed 6, not yet scored 1. New: our looming test (helps; unfair null, weak method by the fixed rules), Flight-test the fly (helps), FlyAim and FlyArm (no difference). No scoring rule changed.
   • Updated records: B FLY67 gains our looming result (grade unchanged); C flybrain.app: its page says a language model ("Claude") acts as the fly's caretaker, on the fly's world, not inside its brain model; C Fly Dino adds trained controls without a connectome that score as well (92.2 vs 92.2); still no wiring null. Stars refreshed for four young repositories.
   • Is it real?: all 20 verdicts re-checked (13 code unchanged since graded, 7 no code, 0 changed). Gorilla Tag 868,853 views, still U. No claim promoted.
   • 4 new entries. All numbers are the authors' own.
     • A Flight-test the fly: a 20,556-neuron FlyWire motion-to-steering circuit as an aircraft yaw damper; better than 10 degree-preserving shuffles (3.19 vs 3.92 deg/s RMS yaw rate), far worse than a classical yaw damper (1.69).
     • A FlyAim: the whole MaleCNS aims a crosshair no better than its shuffle (412.5 vs 430.9 px from the target) and worse than a random walker (251.7). A pre-registered negative result.
     • B FlyArm: a frozen MaleCNS between a trained encoder and decoder drives a robot arm; 72.2% vs 55.9% lift for shuffles, not significant over 6 seeds.
     • C FlyWireGBA: a Game Boy Advance fly; a 128-neuron FlyWire subgraph only gates feeding, a heuristic controller does the rest.
   • Left out: an off-topic Kinect tool. Deferred: an LC4/LPLC2 escape study whose results are not committed yet, a mirror, a desktop-fly derivative and 42 small repositories.
   • Video gallery: 53 videos; a Russian explainer by DenTrave added; every video record has a language field and non-English cards carry a language label. Thumbnails unchanged.
   • New on the site: the chart "Does a shadow on one eye turn the fly away?" on the Overview, Is it real? and the report; a shareable result card; a who-does-what diagram for the looming test on How it works and Does fly wiring help?; language documented on For AI agents. Report of the eighth check
3. 3 Oct 2026

   Seventh check: does it actually run? Six browser demos loaded, a flyvis page and 3 new entries

   104 entries re-checked on 3 Oct 2026: 3 with new commits, 0 new releases, 1 re-grade (fly-cartpole, grade unchanged), 1 repository now marked gone; 52 videos re-checked: all available, 0 removed; 3 entries added, 0 videos added.

   • Our browser check (new, made by us, procedure written down first): six fly-brain browser demos loaded in headless Chromium 154 on Linux without a GPU. 3 ran: Fly Worker (17.55 MB downloaded), FLY67 (33.28 MB) and flybrain.app (12.72 MB). FlyLeno and Help the Fly Escape loaded, then froze, most likely because of software graphics on our machine; fly-brain (Lulzx) stopped at our 1.6 GB memory limit. No demo computed on a server. Not a play test. Results
   • Corrected: FLY67's download size is 33.3 MB, not the "about 100 MB" we estimated before.
   • New project page: flyvis. Every number now quoted from the paper's full text; our ablation wording corrected (direction selectivity does not need synapse counts; only the T4/T5 preferred direction needs single-neuron detail); the 50 pretrained models' validation losses (median 5.300, range 5.137–5.678) read from the authors' files; pretrained models MIT-licensed since 29 Sep 2026; no shuffled-wiring control, which a referee asked for.
   • Re-graded: A fly-cartpole (commit a8c6257) now leads with a MaleCNS flight-stabilisation circuit: 499.9 steps against 165.9 with shuffled wiring (p = 0.0001), so its ledger row moves from no difference to helps; but its own linear map scores 499.6 and LQR 500, so the no-brain baseline is not beaten. Grade unchanged.
   • Controls ledger: 34 studies, 26 with a wiring null: helps 11, no difference 6, worse 2, mixed 6, not yet scored 1. No scoring rule changed.
   • Is it real?: a "Last checked" column on all 20 verdicts (13 code unchanged since graded, 7 no code, 0 changed). Gorilla Tag 724,625 views, still U. A driving compilation (63,935 views) appears to show Flyhard (matched from its thumbnail only). No claim promoted.
   • Link gone: C FlyDoom by eganeganegan returned HTTP 404 for the third day; its link status is now "gone". The record and grade are kept.
   • Re-read: B fly-naf added tablet vision (image differences into looming and small-object neurons); still no wiring control, grade unchanged. New commits without grade effect: acamilo-flybrain, fafbseg.
   • 3 new entries. All numbers are the authors' own.
     • A ChessFly: a FlyWire mushroom-body input layer learns chess by self-play in the browser; real wiring 1680 Elo, shuffled 1675, random design 1850 (one fly each). A clean negative result.
     • C flypoker: a 6,194-neuron MaleCNS subgraph plays Texas Hold'em, but the hand equity is computed outside the brain and the only learned part is a decoder cloned from human hands; no control; no licence file.
     • C neurafly: a terminal music visualiser on the FlyWire v783 graph; the picture reads the same neurons the audio is injected into; no control.
   • Left out: a FlyLeno fan page (a scripted animation and a toy network). Deferred: about 30 new low-star repositories.
   • New on the site: the chart "What your browser downloads to run a fly brain" on the Overview and Ways to try; browser-check results in the catalogue rows; browser_check and the link status "gone" documented on For AI agents.
   • Report: seventh check, 3 Oct 2026.
4. 2 Oct 2026

   Sixth check: who does the walking? Our body test, the Terraria fly refereed and 4 new entries

   100 entries re-checked on 2 Oct 2026: 6 with new commits, 0 new releases, 0 grade changes, 1 repository still gone (HTTP 404); 51 videos re-checked: all available, 0 removed; 4 entries and 1 video added.

   • Our body test (new, made by us, pre-registered): the Shiu et al. whole-brain model drives FlyGym's walking fly through our hand-made mapping. With the forward-walking neurons P9 stimulated, the fly walked 13.9 mm in 1 s with the real brain, 14.1 mm with scrambled brains (3 shuffles with identical drives) and 14.3 mm with a brainless constant drive. The real brain added turning commands (DNa02); tasting sugar sent no walking command and the fly stood still. The mapping caps the drive, so speed could hardly differ. Who does the walking?
   • Controls ledger: 33 studies, 25 with a wiring null: helps 10, no difference 6, worse 2, mixed 6, not yet scored 1. New study: our body test (no difference, fair, strong; its 3 shuffles sent identical drives). No scoring rule changed. Our 1 Oct reflex test: the gain check matched shuffle 3 at ×2.5 but not shuffles 4 and 5, so it is not matched on 3 shuffles and the row stays mixed, unfair and weak; its stale notes were fixed at the source. New display-only fields activity_ratio and activity_class on every arm. controls.json version 2026-10-02-run6.
   • Updated: A fly-cartpole: the ledger now uses commit 077dcba after we read the protocol change (like for like): 392.5 against 390.3 steps for shuffled wiring (p = 0.48); a TD learner reaches the 500-step ceiling. Still no difference, fair and strong; the grade stays A.
   • New verdict: B "I put a fly's brain into Terraria. And tried to train it" (28,244 views on 2 Oct, +24,664 in a day): a checksummed MaleCNS connectome with learning synapses drives a Terraria body through hand-mapped senses and muscles; no control; the code is older than the video.
   • Re-checked: Gorilla Tag 623,504 views and the Roblox fight 141,595, both still U with no code. C FlyDoom by eganeganegan returned HTTP 404 on 1 and 2 Oct 2026; the record is kept with its last catalogued commit. The fly.ai kernel behind fly-plays-games gained NFT code only: no grade change. acamilo-flybrain, Brain Runners, Doodle Fly and fly-naf have new commits with no result change seen.
   • 4 new entries (1 A, 2 B, 1 C). All numbers are the authors' own unless marked.
     • A Hidden attractor in the Shiu et al. model: pre-registered plans and raw results; after a strong sugar pulse about 8,100 neurons keep firing for 10 s without input, also in the original Brian2 code.
     • B Digital Fly in Terraria: the verdict above; we recomputed its 176-life log.
     • B How much of fly walking is written in the wiring?: code for a submitted manuscript comparing real leg networks with six rewired families; no results public yet, so the grade is provisional.
     • C FlyGym + BANC v888 bridge: a FlyGym derivative (not a lure); one descending neuron's rate, set by a fixed current rather than the connectome, scales all six legs.
   • 1 new video: the creator's own upload of the Terraria fly (grade B), described from its title and description only. Thumbnails unchanged.
   • Left out: a second Terraria mod by the same author (no fly brain). Deferred: three small repositories for the second time and about 30 new low-star repositories.
   • Lead scan: 1 claim promoted (Terraria). No widely seen "fly brain learned to walk" video this week; YouTube watch pages were rate-limited, so view counts come from search pages.
   • Build your own: the deeper path Add a body is now tested (brain tested, body tested, mapping ours), with uv, CPython 3.12.11, flygym 2.1.0, the TMPDIR fix and expected numbers.
   • New on the site: the shareable chart "Who does the walking?" on the Overview, Is it real? and Does fly wiring help?; a replay tool for the walks; a measured "who does what" diagram on How it works.
   • Report: sixth check, 2 Oct 2026.
5. 1 Oct 2026

   Fifth check: our own fair test, two viral video claims refereed and 6 new entries

   94 entries re-checked on 1 Oct 2026: 3 with new commits, 0 new releases, 0 grade changes, 1 repository gone (HTTP 404); 49 videos re-checked: all available, 0 removed; 6 entries and 2 videos added.

   • Our own fair test (new, made by us): we scrambled the fly brain four ways, pre-registered before any scrambled trial. On the sugar reflex, real wiring gives MN9 85.2 ± 3.56 Hz; degree-preserving and weight shuffles 0 Hz (5 shuffles each); an interior-only shuffle 39 Hz (retention 0.46); a sign shuffle 214 Hz only because the whole brain ignites. A gain check stayed at 0 Hz but did not match the real activity. Results and limits
   • Controls ledger: 32 studies, 24 with a wiring null: helps 10, no difference 5, worse 2, mixed 6, not yet scored 1. Our own study row now scores Mixed with an unfair null and weak method by the fixed rules (30 Sep: helps, partly fair, moderate), because the gain-matched check did not match. New study: Brain Runners. controls.json updated.
   • New verdicts: U "I Taught a Fly How to Play Gorilla Tag (seriously)" (527,756 views on 1 Oct; no model, data or code named; video not watched) and U "I Made Two Real Flies Brain Fight Each other in JJS" (139,364 views; no code).
   • New chart: a brainless autopilot plays Doom as well as the fly brain, with all 18 results from the Doom control study's file; the 5 numbers our ledger uses match it.
   • Repository gone: C FlyDoom by eganeganegan returned HTTP 404 on 1 Oct 2026 (removed or made private). The record is kept and will be re-checked before removal.
   • Updated: A fly-cartpole (25 new commits) re-checked from its results summary: 392.5 against 390.3 steps for shuffled wiring (the author's p = 0.48). Same verdict, no difference; the ledger keeps the numbers of the commit it was built on until the new protocol is read. C acamilo-flybrain (24 commits: run infrastructure and status notes) and B Open Fly (1 commit): no change to the grade.
   • 6 new entries (1 A, 2 B, 1 C, 2 U). All numbers are the authors' own unless marked.
     • A Brain Runners: an untrained FlyWire brain plays a lane-runner game on held-out tracks: 82.3 rows against 27.8 on shuffled wiring, but the same rule with no brain reaches 74.1.
     • B Doodle Fly: the whole FlyWire brain plays a Doodle-Jump-style game in the browser; its two controls change the eyes, not the wiring.
     • B FLY67: the whole FlyWire brain in a browser tab drives an animated 3D fly that feeds, grooms and escapes; inputs and outputs are hand-made and there is no control.
     • C Fly x Jev: MaleCNS wiring turns a robot's compound eye into visual signals and a learned memory, but an external commercial model picks every action.
     • U Fly plays Gorilla Tag and U two fly brains fight in a Roblox game: video claims with no code.
   • 2 new videos: the creators' own uploads of the Gorilla Tag and Roblox fight videos (both U), described from their titles and descriptions only.
   • Left out: a repository that copies FlyGym's name was confirmed as a plain copy and excluded; a later copy of Fly x Jev was excluded. Neither is linked.
   • Lead scan: 2 claims promoted (Gorilla Tag and the Roblox fight); a new search sorted by views found the high-view videos that our date-sorted searches missed. The Pokémon stream and the Rainbow Six claim stay U.
   • Build your own: re-tested from an empty folder: same pins and data checksums, 6 tests passed, 82.0 Hz bit-exact with our first run. New box: Try a fair control yourself.
   • Report: fifth check, 1 Oct 2026.
6. 30 Sep 2026

   Fourth check: does fly wiring help? A controls ledger, a FlyLeno verdict and 12 new entries

   82 entries re-checked on 30 Sep 2026: 7 with new commits, 3 new releases, 0 grade changes, 0 main-link failures; 47 videos re-checked: all available, 0 removed; 12 entries and 2 videos added.

   • New page: Does fly wiring help? puts 31 control studies side by side. Answer: sometimes. Real fly wiring beat scrambled wiring in 10 of 23 studies, mostly reflex, sensory and steering circuits; in trained, reservoir and ML tasks it tied or lost (7). With a chart of how much each result survives scrambling, a filterable study table, a checklist for fair controls, and the data file controls.json.
   • New verdict: B FlyLeno, "Tonight's host: Grey Leno, piloted by Drosophila melanogaster" (borderline C): the whole FlyWire brain really runs, but gait, homing and the choice of actions are engineered, and there is no control.
   • Is it real?: the Doom row adds the Doom control study's sweep of 12 autopilot settings (the best survives 53.44 s against DOOMFLY's 53.34 s); the Pokémon stream and the Rainbow Six claim were re-checked and stay U; the flydoom (mutkuoz) text notes that its new commits concern a separate variant and its grade A stands; the controls section now points to the new ledger (31 studies, 23 with a wiring null) instead of its 20-study table.
   • Updated: C acamilo-flybrain release v0.6.7 adds a damage reward to the Pokémon battles; it changes the reward, not the mechanism, and the grade stays C.
   • Updated: n/a FlyWire neuron annotations Version 3.2.0 (29 Sep 2026): an annotation release, not a new connectome.
   • Updated: C Kick the Fly 2.13.0 and 2.13.1: tests and tooling; the grade stays C.
   • Re-checked: C Haltere's round-6 flights passed the Minus Two hairpin for the first time, still with no race finish; A flydoom (mutkuoz) re-scored a separate variant, and the plain model's scorecard is unchanged. No grade changed.
   • 12 new entries (2 A, 5 B, 2 C, 1 D, 2 not graded), including the two held back on 29 Sep. All numbers are the authors' own unless marked.
     • A fly-cartpole: a careful negative result: fly mushroom bodies learn CartPole, but shuffled wiring learns about as well (234 against 218 steps, p = 0.20; recomputed by us), and a standard learning algorithm does better.
     • A flybrain-connectome-benchmark: a pre-registered test of the Shiu et al. whole-brain model against published experiments: single-neuron knockout effects predicted with sensitivity 0.77 and specificity 0.99 (preprint).
     • B FlyLeno (TUURD Talk): a browser talk show hosted by a ragdoll driven by the whole FlyWire brain (borderline C). Verdict
     • B FlyKart: the whole MaleCNS brain steers a go-kart; the game computes what the fly "sees", and the controls are hand-mapped. A new CPU path runs without a GPU.
     • B Open Fly: the whole Shiu et al. brain plays a strategy game in the browser; a shuffled control is pre-registered but has no result yet.
     • B Fly With Me (Fly Brain DJ): the FlyWire brain hears music and triggers DJ moves; the mixing skill is ordinary audio code.
     • B Fly-NAF: the FlyWire brain plays Five Nights at Freddy's; the seeing is a pixel-difference threshold, and each action comes from one chosen neuron.
     • C making-fly-play-chess: a fixed FlyWire patch with a trained readout plays chess and ties its own rewired copy (0.506), in a run the author marks as a code check.
     • C FlyCNS Tic-Tac-Toe: by default a minimax solver picks the playable moves, so the fly circuit only breaks ties.
     • D FLYBRAIN Bad Apple x DOOM: a connectome viewer that uses neurons as pixels; no brain activity is simulated.
     • n/a connectome_interpreter: a library for turning wiring diagrams into testable circuit hypotheses.
     • n/a FlyBrainLab: an older interactive platform for fly brain data and circuits (last commit September 2025).
   • 2 new videos: Vinesauce's FlyLeno stream (B), a streamer's playthrough, not the author's upload, and Fly-NAF's best run (B), the author's upload.
   • Data files: two new optional fields on every catalogue record, controls (wiring-null 22, baseline-only 8, none 64) and wiring_effect, in projects.json and its schema; the catalogue filter gains a Controls filter. The change is additive: existing fields are unchanged.
   • Lead scan: 1 claim promoted (FlyLeno); the Pokémon stream (Leetzerzz) and the Rainbow Six claim unchanged. 0 link failures and 0 video removals.
   • Build your own: pins unchanged (re-test due by 12 Oct 2026); the "Add a body" path now states FlyGym's Python requirement from the package index.
   • Report: fourth check, 30 Sep 2026.
7. 29 Sep 2026

   Third check: two viral claims refereed, DesktopFly re-graded to C, 9 new entries

   73 entries re-checked on 29 Sep 2026: 3 with new commits and releases, 1 re-graded (DesktopFly B to C), all main links responding; 44 videos re-checked: all available; 9 entries and 3 videos added.

   • Re-graded: C DesktopFly, from B (borderline C) to C. Neuron rates only switch coded flight, grooming and dart animations, and sleep follows the computer's idle time and clock; only walking is driven by simulated leg neurons. The code is unchanged since 5 Sep 2026.
   • Updated: C Kick the Fly release 2.12.0 (29 Sep) adds a larva brain for headless tests (its two validation tests fail, as the author reports), flies that differ and a pet mode. Re-checked: the playable game still uses the adult brain, and the grade stays C.
   • Updated: C Haltere release fast-brain-11 (29 Sep, experimental): a braking motor readout flew one full Straw Bale lap in 1:42.988, but every flight ended in a crash and there is still no race finish. Documentation only; the grade stays C.
   • Updated: n/a neuprint-python release 0.6.4: a client update with notes for bulk downloads, not a dataset change.
   • 9 new entries (1 A, 4 C, 2 U, 2 not graded). All numbers are the authors' own, not reproduced by us.
     • A Are fruit flies zero-shot adapters?: an eye model, a whole FlyWire brain and a NeuroMechFly body find poles, also after two legs are cut; scrambled wiring or disconnected turn neurons fail (2.96 against 0.34 and 0.12 poles per 10 s). Walking itself is a hand-built rhythm.
     • C flybrain (Game Boy fly): a whole FlyWire brain plays Pokémon Red on a stream, but the author's own check found the decoder, not the network, choosing directions in long runs, and the stream uses scripted macro actions (borderline C).
     • C fly-plays-games: a MaleCNS fly brain in Pokémon Red; the long walk in its video is a scripted planner, and in fly mode the brain only chooses left or right.
     • C Fruit fly vs Jev: Roblox maze race: most of the fly's steering comes from a scripted helper blended into the command.
     • C NeuroWeave: 150 MaleCNS neurons as a trained mask; the fly subgraph does not beat a random graph where a control exists, and several README figures differ from the stored results.
     • U Fruit fly brain plays Pokémon on a Raspberry Pi 5: a Twitch stream covered by XDA Developers; no code, and the input is read from game memory by the creator's account. Verdict
     • U Fly brain plays Rainbow Six Siege: a claim reported by dev.ua; no code, and its "over 1,000,000 neurons" matches no fly connectome. Verdict
     • n/a fly-connectome-template: a browser template that renders MaleCNS cell positions; custom attribution licence.
     • n/a fafbseg: an R package for FlyWire data (release downloads, meshes, annotations).
   • 3 new videos: the project's own zero-shot wiring test (A), the Roblox maze race (C) and Haltere's Straw Bale race (C).
   • Is it real?: verdict rows for the Pokémon stream and the Rainbow Six claim; the wiring test next to the Doom test; the DesktopFly row corrected (sleep follows the clock, not a neuron; the quoted claim is the repository description, not the README); the Half-Life row re-checked (code unchanged, a second contradicted claim added).
   • New project page: DesktopFly, with a warning about download copies that borrow its name.
   • Data files: the enumerated fields of projects.json are now clean at the source; the published values did not change.
   • Report: third check, 29 Sep 2026.
8. 28 Sep 2026

   Second check: 15 new projects, a Doom control study and two new project pages

   58 entries re-checked on 28 Sep 2026: 58 unchanged, 0 with new commits, all main links responding; 40 videos re-checked: all available. This re-check came only about 22 hours after the first pass, so "no changes" is expected and says little about how fast the field moves.

   • Link check: 0 link problems; 2 dead repositories (fly-survivors, ommatid) excluded from our lead list.
   • 15 new entries (5 A, 1 B, 5 C, 2 D, 2 not graded). All numbers are the authors' own, not reproduced by us; the C grades rest on file citations we spot-read, not re-verified line by line.
     • A Is the fly brain actually playing DOOM?: a control study: a brainless constant autopilot survives in Doom about as long as DOOMFLY's full brain (51.9 s against 53.3 s).
     • A doomfly-rl: a trained Doom player built around fly wiring; real, shuffled and no wiring score the same.
     • A Fly Self Driving: the MaleCNS graph with trained gains steers a car and narrowly beats rewired wiring on one task (borderline A).
     • A flydoom (mutkuoz): an untrained FlyWire whole brain plays Doom and beats a matched random agent only narrowly.
     • A Null models at the sensory-motor boundary: which random-wiring control is fair; the answer changes the result (borderline A: brain compressed to 512 groups).
     • B Fly.exe: a full MaleCNS spiking simulation drives twelve fly bodies through hand-picked neurons; no wiring control.
     • C FlyBridge: the Minecraft farming video: a trained 1,536-neuron part of the wiring inside a policy, with scripted walking and aiming.
     • C fly-api: wraps the Shiu model for the sugar test; its body demos use no connectome or a small part.
     • C fly-brain (erojas): a full FlyWire model steers a body, but most behaviours are scripted routines (borderline C).
     • C Haltere: a 30,000-neuron MaleCNS part trained to fly a drone; 0 of 2 races finished.
     • C Kick the Fly: a live 166,700-neuron simulation only triggers scripted game reactions (borderline C).
     • D FlyBrain-HalfLife: the Half-Life video claims MaleCNS, but by default the code builds a synthetic network.
     • D FlyBrain Robot Bridge: eight hand-set units drive a robot; the MaleCNS part is an empty stub.
     • n/a FlyWire neuron annotations: annotation tables for FlyWire v783 (no licence file).
     • n/a Virtual Fly Brain: an online atlas and search hub for fly neuroanatomy (its own MCP server was not tested by us).
   • 4 new videos: the Half-Life video (grade D) and video files from doom-fly-control (A), Fly.exe (B) and flydoom (A).
   • Video remapped: SWOT's Minecraft farming video now links to its catalogue entry, FlyBridge (grade C).
   • Text correction: the DOOMFLY limitations text no longer contains notes about how its grade was reached inside our team. The grade (B) and its reasons are unchanged.
   • Is it real?: the Doom test, an updated DOOMFLY verdict, new rows for Half-Life and Minecraft farming, and 5 new controlled studies.
   • New project pages: DOOMFLY and the Shiu et al. brain model, the base of Build your own.
   • Report: second check, 28 Sep 2026.
9. 28 Sep 2026

   New page: Video gallery with 40 fly brain videos

   After readers asked for the videos behind the viral demos, we checked 40 of them and matched each one to the catalogue.

   • Video gallery: 40 videos (22 YouTube, 13 X, 2 TikTok, 3 on project sites). 35 are original uploads by the project's author, lab or institution; 5 reposts or commentary videos are labelled and linked to their original.
   • Grades from the catalogue, not from the videos: each card shows its project's evidence grade and what the video does not show. Two popular Minecraft videos (Ro0oney, SWOT FlyBridge) are not in the catalogue and are not graded.
   • 21 of 58 catalogue entries now link to their videos, and the Is it real? verdicts link to the matching clips.
   • No inline player: YouTube, Vimeo, TikTok and X players failed inside the site's sandboxed frames in our test, so every video opens on its original platform. Nothing is re-hosted.
   • New data file videos.json and a research report with the method, the player test and the videos we left out.
10. 28 Sep 2026

    First release: 58 checked projects

    The first version of the catalogue. Every entry was checked on 27–28 September 2026.

    • 58 entries: 12 browser demos, 9 games, 2 desktop apps, 2 art projects, 12 research and control studies, 6 brain models and engines, 2 fly bodies, 7 datasets and 6 data tools.
    • Evidence grades from code: 12 A, 12 B, 10 C, 1 D, 5 U and 18 not graded (datasets and tools).
    • True update dates: last commit and last release read from each repository, not the creation date.
    • Licences from the licence files: 39 repositories have one, 10 have none, 9 entries have no code repository.
    • Links: 148 links checked on 28 September; the main link of every entry answered (56 directly, 2 through a redirect). 28 no-install links respond; none was played by us.
    • New pages: verdicts on 12 viral claims and 13 controlled studies (Is it real?), seven datasets compared (How it works), and a machine-readable JSON copy (For AI agents).
    • Build your own guide: the published whole-brain model run from an empty folder on Linux with 2 CPUs, no GPU (tested 28 Sep 2026, 28 minutes): sugar input drove MN9 to 85.2 Hz; shuffled wiring gave 0 Hz in 6 of 6 trials. macOS, Windows and GitHub Pages are untested.
    • First research report with methods, sources and open questions, in Research.
    • Newest projects included: dotFly, FlyBrain reservoir, bioreservoir, FlyArena BANC and pianist-fly, all created 20–27 September 2026.

How to follow changes

The Shaduf platform publishes an Atom feed of this changelog, linked from every page of the pool. Each research run is also saved in Research.

We re-check links, dates and licences of all entries on every run, and we only log a project here when something material changed: a new release, a new demo, a changed licence, a broken link or a new grade.