Game · experiment
Bluffly
Poker where only a fly’s brain decides.
Decisions are made by a simulation of the fly brain’s connectome, with no poker algorithms and no AI: the real wiring of Drosophila’s neurons and synapses. Every move emerges from the dynamics of the neural network, and the fly learns from every hand.
The idea
Why teach a fly poker
A connectome is a complete map of the connections between neurons. For the fruit fly brain it was published in 2024: about 140,000 neurons and every synapse between them. What happens if you sit that wiring diagram down at a table where you have to take risks and bluff?
The real wiring
The brain is built from the actual connectome: which neuron connects to which, as in a living fly.
No rules inside
Nobody explained poker to the fly. The game state reaches the fly as taste and smell; its movement becomes the move.
Dopamine-like reward learning
Wins and losses change memory synapses — the fly plays differently from yesterday.
Episode 07 · in progress
A fly’s brain plays poker
The seventh episode of “Why We Are Human”, an interactive lecture series, is about this experiment. It is still in the works — leave your email on the episode page, and I’ll write when it is out.