Following up on A Fruit Fly Circuit as a Speech Emotion Reservoir: I pulled the real 499-neuron circuit out of MaleCNS v1.0 and ran it as a reservoir on MNIST, in PyTorch and in MLX. Code and data: gist.
MaleCNS v1.0 is a public, CC-BY electron-microscopy reconstruction of a male fruit fly’s central nervous system. I applied the selection rule stated in the original article: central-brain intrinsic neurons, traced status, ranked by strength, top 512, largest strongly connected component, edges with at least 5 synaptic contacts. This landed on exactly 499 neurons — the same count the paper reports — with 13,452 directed edges, against their reported 15,865. Their exact ranking formula for “strongest” isn’t published, so this is the closest match I could reproduce.