Play Droso

Neuron cards

Every unit in the game stands for a real cell type. Cards light up once their neuron fires during play.

Science note

This game is not a brain upload. The fly runs on a hand-tuned network of about 25 cell-type units, each a leaky integrate-and-fire (LIF) neuron. Every unit is updated in 1 ms steps, and the game advances 50 times per second.

Taken from the literature

• Escape: the LC4 and LPLC2 looming neurons feed the giant fiber (GF, DNp01). If GF fires early the fly makes a short-mode takeoff; if the parallel pathways act first it makes a long-mode takeoff (von Reyn et al. 2014, 2017).
• Walking: DNg100 drives forward walking, and connectome simulations suggest that a three-neuron circuit downstream of it can generate the rhythm (Sapkal et al., bioRxiv 2026). Turning speed tracks the difference between left and right DNa02 (Rayshubskiy et al., eLife 2025). MDN drives backward walking (Bidaye et al. 2014).
• Feeding: sugar neurons drive the proboscis motor neuron MN9 and bitter neurons suppress it (Shiu et al., Nature 2024).
• Courtship: P1 is male-specific; P9 makes the male follow the female (Bidaye et al. 2020) and pIP10 starts the song (von Philipsborn et al. 2011). That a female directly ahead suppresses DNg13 through VES200m is a hypothesis proposed in the MaleCNS paper.

Simplified for the game

• Connection weights were not taken from synapse counts in neuPrint; each cell type is a single unit and the weights were tuned for play.
• Hunger boosting the taste pathway, P1's persistent arousal variable and the shape of reflex fatigue are additions that are not in the connectome. Habituation under repeated stimulation has been reported in the GF pathway (Engel and Wu 1996); the curve in the game is illustrative.
• Fruit prices, the female's wandering and the swatter are scenario. The effect of red light is treated as instantaneous.
• A short-mode (giant fiber) jump follows the fly's current heading, and the fly lands facing the way it flew. Real flies spend about 200 ms adjusting their posture so that the jump carries them away from the threat (Card and Dickinson 2008); the game aims only long-mode takeoffs.

Plan for the production version

The same subcircuits will be extracted from MaleCNS v1.0 (neuPrint, male-cns:v1.0) with real synapse counts. Attribution: Berg, Beckett et al., Cell 189(18), 2026, doi:10.1016/j.cell.2026.08.015, CC BY 4.0.

Why deterministic?

The same seed and the same input log produce the same score on every device. That is why only a few hundred bytes of input go to Robinhood Chain, and anyone can verify the leaderboard by replaying the logs in their own browser.

The day's seed also fixes the stall for everyone: the fruit, when and how fast the swatter swings, the female's visits and the neurons' background noise follow from the seed, not from your inputs. Two players on the same day face the same stall; only what they do differs.

Leaderboard

The ranking needs no trust: this browser replays every log it ranks. A claim counts only if its replay gives exactly the claimed score, and a copy of an earlier log counts for nobody, whoever sent it. A player's daily score is their best counted claim; ties go to the earlier submission. A game week is 7 days counted from the game's first day, and the weekly score is the sum of a player's best 5 days (fewer days count as played); equal sums go to the player whose last counted submission came first. Claims are verified from the highest down, so a list that stops early still shows the exact top of the ranking.

Token

Launch tokens are volatile and can lose all value. Names and symbols can be copied, so always check the token address. The game never requires a token, scores never pay out, and nothing here is financial advice.