Eon Systems emulates fruit fly brain in digital simulation

Researchers at Eon Systems have successfully emulated the complete brain of a fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, within a digital simulation. Unlike traditional artificial intelligence that mimics behavior through training, this method, referred to as ‘flycoding’, uses the actual biological neural structure of the insect to control a virtual body.

The digital brain was reconstructed using the FlyWire connectome, an international project involving researchers from Princeton and the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology. The model incorporates approximately 139,255 neurons and over 50 million synaptic connections mapped from a physical brain.

In the simulation, sensory information is processed by the digital neurons, which then send motor commands to a virtual body via the NeuroMechFly v2 platform and the MuJoCo physics engine. This allows the digital insect to exhibit natural behaviors, such as walking toward food in a virtual environment, by replicating the insect's exact biological wiring.