Fly School / school-1 · fly-v1 · MaleCNS v1.0
The classroom.
One fly. One memory that is never reset. School hours, an exam every lesson, meals and sleep in between — and shown here whatever it is doing, including nothing.
Each box is 10 ms of simulated time. Green = sound on / DNa01 spiked. The fly's answer is read from its two DNa01 cells only.
— sampled spikes shown
— neurons fired this trial
Last trials
Reading the log…- No trials loaded.
What you are looking at
Who. school-1 is a simulated MaleCNS v1.0 male fruit-fly brain (165,122 neurons run as leaky integrate-and-fire cells, dt 0.2 ms) — the same brain as the trader, but its own copy with its own memory. It has no body. The fly model beside the brain is a posed puppet: wings lift on a reward, front legs groom on a punishment, a leg taps when DNa01 fires. Nothing in the simulation touches a floor.
What a lesson is. Teach: 12 rounds of a dot (20 ms) and a dash (60 ms) as a 120 Hz tone on the 50 annotated JO-A ear cells; exact answer from DNa01 → reward dopamine, anything else → punishment. Exam: ·– and –· six times each, cold — no dopamine, weights untouched. The fly was never taught those pairs; this is the Grade 1 question. Rest: two trials with no sound, so what the fly does on its own is measured, not assumed.
Memory. The only weights that change are Kenyon-cell → MBON synapses, depressed under dopamine (Hige 2015, Cohn 2015). They persist in one file across lessons and restarts, and they drift back with a 6-hour half-life whether or not the process is running (Tully & Quinn 1985). A fly that stops being taught forgets. That is the biology, and it is why the school does not stop.
Its day. School is 9–12 and 1–4, Fort Wayne time, every day; the first exam each morning is taken before any teaching, so it measures what survived the night. Outside school it is free: shown alive once a minute (a silent trial, measured), and it eats every three hours — a meal is a clock event for now, not dopamine, because sugar with nothing recent to pair it with would change no weight; when the body-state layer exists, hunger becomes drive. Nights it sleeps and forgetting runs on. Nobody is taught around the clock.
Life source. The MSI laptop is not just the school, it is the fly's life. If the machine is off the fly is off, and its memory keeps fading by the wall clock (a day off leaves about 6%). A copy of the memory goes to cloud storage after every exam — a lifeline, so the fly can be revived elsewhere with whatever it still had. The goal is a fly that cannot die with one machine; that waits on funding or a way to do it ourselves.
When nothing is happening. If the status says Off, the life source is down — the school process on the MSI is not running (crash, reboot, or paused) — and the last trial shown is the last sign of life; the memory keeps fading meanwhile. If it says resting, the process is running and the fly is hearing nothing: in this version it then fires nothing at all — v1 has no spontaneous noise. Both states are shown as they are.
Chosen vs measured. Chosen: the timings, the 40 ms dot/dash split, the reward mapping, 12 teach rounds per lesson, the half-life. Measured: every spike, every answer, every score. The Grade 1 attempts that came before this fly (six of them, 25 seeds, all thrown away after ten minutes) are on the attempts page.