{"slug": "can-a-fruit-fly-brain-learn-numbers", "title": "Can a Fruit Fly Brain Learn Numbers?", "summary": "A 499-neuron circuit extracted from MaleCNS v1.0, the Janelia-published CC-BY electron-microscopy reconstruction of a male fruit fly's central nervous system, was run as a reservoir on MNIST in PyTorch and MLX, matching the 499-neuron count reported in the underlying paper but yielding 13,452 directed edges against the paper's reported 15,865. The reproduction applied the original selection rule — central-brain intrinsic neurons, traced status, ranked by strength, top 512, largest strongly connected component, edges with at least 5 synaptic contacts — and the author noted the paper's exact ranking formula for \"strongest\" is unpublished, making this the closest match achievable. Code and data were released via a public gist.", "body_md": "Following up on [A Fruit Fly Circuit as a Speech Emotion Reservoir](https://julin.ai/2026/09/09/fly-brain-emotion/): 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](https://github.com/ml-explore/mlx). Code and data: [gist](https://gist.github.com/soasme/caa8b071e85d76aff44aec8f259d0870).\n\n[MaleCNS v1.0](https://male-cns.janelia.org/download/) is a public, CC-BY electron-microscopy reconstruction of a male fruit fly’s central nervous system.\n\nI 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.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/can-a-fruit-fly-brain-learn-numbers", "canonical_source": "https://julin.ai/2026/09/11/fly-circuit-on-mnist/", "published_at": "2026-09-10 12:00:00+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-09-11 09:34:10.509754+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["machine-learning", "neural-networks", "ai-research"], "entities": ["MaleCNS v1.0", "Janelia", "PyTorch", "MLX", "MNIST"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/can-a-fruit-fly-brain-learn-numbers", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/can-a-fruit-fly-brain-learn-numbers.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/can-a-fruit-fly-brain-learn-numbers.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/can-a-fruit-fly-brain-learn-numbers.jsonld"}}