

An open source platform for emulating the fruit fly brain - mlla
http://neurokernel.github.io/

======
coconutrandom
This is really cool, also check out
[http://www.openworm.org/](http://www.openworm.org/) which was started around
the same time. I wish there was a comparison of the two projects.

~~~
LowDog
These projects are amazing, and I only wish I knew about them a few years
earlier. I studied C. elegans quite a bit when I was in school, and I also
worked with D. melanogaster for a genetics project. I wonder how OpenWorm will
help shape research in the years to come as it matures. It's a really nice
surprise to see useful, open software that it so pertinent to the things I
spent so much time studying - I hope I can still reach the people who picked
up on my old projects and share these tools with them.

------
wicker
This is really cool. The other fruit fly project I was impressed by recently
was Mihir Garimella's FlyBot: Mimicking Fruit Fly Response Patterns for Threat
Evasion [1] which was a quadcopter that demonstrated evasive behavior. I
really like looking at biomimicry implementations because there are so many
levels on which to do it. Mimir was trying to mimic outwardly observable
behavior while Neurokernel is trying to mimic neural pathways.

[1]
[https://www.googlesciencefair.com/projects/en/2014/6d1893c20...](https://www.googlesciencefair.com/projects/en/2014/6d1893c2059f3eda04a13d6bda68a553f7760148ffc92ff3c97f30725ef1b195)

~~~
apl
Please note that while interesting in the context of a 14-year old executing
it (under heavy supervision, I suspect based on the trajectory model), the
translation from fly or bee to robot has been done for almost thirty years on
a much larger scale. If you're interested, check out the work of Srinivasan,
Borst, or this cool piece of engineering:

[http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v497/n7447/full/nature1...](http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v497/n7447/full/nature12083.html)

------
wassyape
This is very important. When people talk about emulating/uploading human
brains, they extrapolate computing power and scanning to a point ~2040 when we
will have the capability. But guess what, we have the capacity to upload a
roundworm now or a fly and have tried to, and we cannot. Wy? it seems that
there is something we are missing and most likely it's the science. tl;dr we
need to understand brains better before we can upload a human or a fly, this
kind of project will get us there.

~~~
gwern
I would be more impressed by your argument if these projects seemed to have
any support or real energy behind them besides a handful of hobbyists and grad
students. There's snake oil with far more funding and backing than these
projects.

------
rsaarelm
As far as I understand, the endgame of this stuff is a piece of software which
would make a robot that was an exact physical equivalent of a fly without a
brain behave exactly as a real fly does, assuming we had the computing power
to run it in real time. Are these projects actually going for that, or do they
have some more modest goal for what they expect to achieve, say, before 2020?

------
juliangamble
Well if they scale this up a bit - they can use it to fly planes.

"Brain in a Dish Flies Plane" [http://news.discovery.com/tech/robotics/brain-
dish-flies-pla...](http://news.discovery.com/tech/robotics/brain-dish-flies-
plane-041022.htm")

------
gioele
This project is a threat to the Linux kernel. Matthew Garrett may become
interested again in fruit flies and stop finding and fixing the moist weird
bugs in the ACPI/PM implementation of Linux.

~~~
oscargrouch
I think the term kernel is being used as gpu kernels/programs; those created
with OpenCL, etc..; So its a proper naming scheme.

Maybe we should blame the GPU folks for switching from "shader " to "kernel"
for general computing shaders instead?

~~~
gioele
Argh, it is horrible when you have to explain jokes.

Matthew Garrett (mjg59 on HN) is a well known Linux developer. [1] He has a
real talent for discovering and fixing weird, _weird_, problems with hardware
firmwares, especially issues related to ACPI and UEFI. Have a look at his
Linux.conf.au 2014 talk [2] to understand the kind of weirdness we are talking
about (You will want to cry and laugh at the same time).

Before becoming a kernel hacker, Matthew Garrett earned a PhD in genetics
studying fruit flies.

Now this project is very cool, both from the programming point of view and
from the fruit fly point of view. Hence the fear that Garrett may abandon his
spectacular work on the Linux kernel to go back to his original academic
interests.

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_Garrett](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_Garrett)
[2]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QP9c7aCZqtU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QP9c7aCZqtU)

~~~
oscargrouch
Oh thank you for the context; i've misunderstood what you have said than; i
thought you were joking about a "fruit fly kernel" not being a proper kernel
to replace the linux kernel, with some sarcasm added to it

Sorry, stupidity mine

------
paulvs
Great project. After poking around the site, I'm still wondering, what GPU
hardware is necessary to run the code?

~~~
p1esk
Any Nvidia card made in the last 5 years will do.

------
_red
Are we running this VM inside another VM?

