WIRED builds PitchFly, a story idea tool using a fruit fly brain map

In short: WIRED created PitchFly, a simple website that uses an open-source map of a fruit fly’s brain to suggest new story ideas.

What's going on

WIRED writer Will Knight built PitchFly using a detailed digital map of a male fruit fly’s brain. This kind of map is called a connectome, which is like a wiring diagram that shows how brain cells connect and signal each other.

The connectome used here includes about 166,000 neurons (brain cells) and around 125 million synapses (the connection points where cells pass signals). Researchers from Google and several academic institutions released it openly, which made it easy for other people to reuse.

To make PitchFly, Knight collected hundreds of popular WIRED headlines from the past year and fed them into the simulated fly brain. The fly brain does not understand the words. It works more like a pattern mixer, taking what it has seen and producing new combinations that look similar.

After the connectome was released, many other small projects popped up online. People have shown demos of the virtual fly brain attempting tasks like playing games such as Beat Saber, Doom, Minecraft, and Pong, and even making stock trades in a project called StonkFly.

What to watch

Some of these projects are jokes, and WIRED notes it has not verified every demo. Still, the bigger point is clear: as more research tools become open-source, more people can build unusual, small-scale AI experiments quickly, including ones that use biology as a starting point instead of a typical chatbot model.

Source: Wired