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An adult fruit fly brain has been mapped

economist.com

101–110 of 208 posts

Re: An adult fruit fly brain has been mapped

#101
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks! Macroexpanded: Whole-brain connectome of the fruit fly - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36568609 - July 2023 (94 comments) The connectome of an insect brain by Winding et al. - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35112234 - March 2023 (1 comment) Map of an Insect’s Brain - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35111371 - March 2023 (119 comments) The Connectome of an Insect Brain - https://news.ycombina…

Out there question: Do you have a hand crafted database of these setup or some sort of macro to take the output of the search api and form it like this, or are you hand editing these lists?

That question is so in there, there is also a list of many of the answers

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35668525

Re: An adult fruit fly brain has been mapped

#102
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How's Open Worm coming along? The connectome of C. Elegans has been known for years, and Open Worm tries to simulate it. [1] Not with enormous success. [1] https://openworm.org/assets/OpenWormPoster_Celegans_Glasgow_...

Like everything in science: we don't know until we know. No need to treat research like a business.

Budgets are finite, and most science funding involves some decision making about how to allocate resources.

Re: An adult fruit fly brain has been mapped

#103
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cartographers have mapped Scotland. [random scribe muses that] The whole world could be next.

Did a rough calculation, it would be more like Edinburgh. There's easily a century between the earliest accurate map of Edinburgh and the earliest accurate map of the world. And even at present, the accuracy of maps of Edinburgh is much greater than the accuracy of maps of the world. So yeah, the whole world could be next. But the person you're replying to has a point when they say significant improvements are needed…

> Did a rough calculation, it would be more like Edinburgh.

To put a fine point on the difference in scale:

Edinburgh[0]: 264 square km

Earth[1]: 510,000,000 square km

0 - https://www.britannica.com/place/Edinburgh-Scotland

1 - https://www.universetoday.com/25756/surface-area-of-the-eart...

Re: An adult fruit fly brain has been mapped

#104

Going to need a significant improvement in the software to get it to map a human. The fruit flu has 140,000 neurons and 54.5 million synapses and the AI that mapped it required a post process with humans checking it all with 3 million edits and they still have to identify every neuron type. A human brain has about 86 billion neurons and quite likely many trillions of synapses and that is likely an underestimate. That…

You seem to have called it a fruit flu twice... Was that a typo or do you actually mean to call it a flu instead of a fly?!

Re: An adult fruit fly brain has been mapped

#105
post #15

"human brains could follow" feels like a few jumps ahead? a fruit fly has on the order of 100k neurons, a human brain has on the order of 100 billion neurons. that's 6 orders of magnitude larger. that's like saying "A map of San Francisco has been completed, the entire solar system could follow!"

The method used seems like it would work as well on bigger brains. The amount of data may mean we have to wait for Moore's Law to keep improving things for a while though.

Moores law ended.

Re: An adult fruit fly brain has been mapped

#106
post #11

Datahoarder question but can I download the map of the fly?

See the FAQ: https://codex.flywire.ai/faq which leads to the API for access: https://codex.flywire.ai/api/download You'd need to inspect the paper, the supplementals, and the website closely to determine exactly which files are interesting.

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Re: An adult fruit fly brain has been mapped

#107
> Data available for download, programmatic access and interactive browsing and have been made interoperable with other fly data resources

Curious what a 'fly brain map' looks like - iss the download a 3D model, or a matrix with values for attributes?

Re: An adult fruit fly brain has been mapped

#108
post #80

My (maybe very ignorant) question is: can this connectome be used to “run” simulations of a virtual fruit fly, a la MMAcevedo?

It’s a neural network without weights. And it doesn’t have a body.

Figuring out the behaviour of the neurons could take decades, although I have no doubt that people will eventually. And simulating a whole fruit fly body seems like it’s going to be out of reach for a very long time.

Re: An adult fruit fly brain has been mapped

#109

Is this correct? It this like knowing only this: which neuron is connected to which neuron But you don't know: the values of the weights (the value of the neuron, or the parameters) the activation functions what circuit do neurons implement (fully connected? CNN?)

I don’t think the last one is right. Fully connected and CNN are part of “what neuron is connected to what neuron” (though in the case of CNN, a number of corresponding “neurons” have equal weights going to/from them ).

Also, “activation function” isn’t exactly the right thing for real biological neurons. They aren’t just functions of the current input or the like. Their behavior depends on their recent history. Some will like, by themselves iirc, periodically fire. Others will fire if enough input is sent within some amount of time (in some models of some of them there’s like, some accumulations of signal when receiving inputs, which gradually decays/leaks, and it fires (and depletes) if enough is accumulated).

But yes, the idea is that “what is connected to what” is obtained, but not more specific things about how the ones that are connected are connected (how the behavior of one relates to the behavior of the ones it is connected to).

Re: An adult fruit fly brain has been mapped

#110
post #104

Going to need a significant improvement in the software to get it to map a human. The fruit flu has 140,000 neurons and 54.5 million synapses and the AI that mapped it required a post process with humans checking it all with 3 million edits and they still have to identify every neuron type. A human brain has about 86 billion neurons and quite likely many trillions of synapses and that is likely an underestimate. That…

You seem to have called it a fruit flu twice... Was that a typo or do you actually mean to call it a flu instead of a fly?!

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