Stakefly: a fly brain playing slots on Stake
Stakefly runs the measured wiring diagram of a fruit fly's central nervous system, the public MaleCNS v1.0 connectome, 166,700 neurons and 25.6 million connections, as a spiking network. In front of it is a phone showing a slot machine. Its descending neurons press Spin. When the reels pay, a current goes into its fifteen PAM11 dopamine neurons, and a published plasticity rule changes 7,835 of its synapses. The bankroll is real money: the token's creator fees, sent to the fly's casino account, feed the habit.
Three words that appear on every page
Every claim here is labelled with one of three words, a habit borrowed from flyhard and kept by fly-wirehead, whose kernel we run.
- Measured. The wiring, the spikes, the PAM11 firing rate, the edges that moved.
- Engineered. What we chose: the reward current, the four readout neurons and their threshold, the bet rule, the body's animation.
- Learned. Only the Kenyon-cell-to-MBON07/11 weights, moved by the rule.
What it is not
The game pays less than it takes. No brain, this one included, changes that: over enough spins the bankroll loses wagered × (1 − return). The page shows the observed return against the published one and the expected loss so far. A run that ends up is luck.
PAM11 firing is a rate in hertz. It is not a dopamine level, not pleasure, and not addiction. A changing weight is not evidence of learning to like anything; the Results page has the controls.