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  • At some point in the future would it be possible to simply download a DNA sequence of an entire animal as a "ROM" and boot it into a virtual "reality"?

    What detail level of reality would we have to emulate for an egg to grow into an adult animal?

    by qingcharles
  • To give you a sense of the computation needed, a spatiotemporal physics simulation of a minimal (493 gene) bacterium's full 105 minute cellular cycle took 4-6 days of GPU hours on two A100s.

    https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S009286742...

    Compare this with a c elegens nematode: ~20000 protein coding genes and 959 cells, with all the extra machinery you'll find in a eukaryotic cell.

    I'm reading this as both a question of raw simulation surface and combinatorics.

    by Leynos
  • Oh nice, might use this to create some art for my home.

    https://www.instagram.com/p/DMfi-9Vsl-u/

    > Infinite Pain is a computer running a deterministic neural simulation of a microscopic nematode worm’s brain (c. elegans), subjected to regular pain stimuli.

    by kypro
  • are you ok ?
    by ddlsmurf
  • No demo video?
    by uniq7
  • FYI it takes less than 30 seconds do clone, build, and run.
    by tedd4u
  • I just found this video on YouTube now:

    https://youtu.be/A8fDr7Rr7yM?is=cHwOQVrli9oXLdqY

    by davidkwast
  • This has to be some of the coolest stuff I've seen on HN in a while. I'm running 3 flies on my desktop right now, all powered by realistic brains.
    by sgt
  • A simple video showcasing one fruit picture opened in Preview with the fly going for it would have been nice.
    by Bengalilol
  • Ah, Mr. Acevedo, nice to see you.
    by pavel_lishin
  • Interesting work! There's NeuroMechFly (https://github.com/NeLy-EPFL/flygym/) available, you might try using that to simulate the fly body in real time as well.
    by aperrien
  • I have no exposure to connectomes - or really anything quite like this (as opposed to good ol’ fashioned perceptrons) - so forgive my following uninformed question:

    Can someone explain if this software is ethical?

    by DaiPlusPlus
  • Why do you think it wont be?
    by ramraj07
  • Yes. Because it’s a simulation of a living thing. It’s still electrons moving around silicon. It deserves the respect your MacBook does. Which is not nothing. But certainly not what’s due to a life.
    by randomImmigrant
  • > if this software is ethical?

    IMO, it absolutely is.

    First, if fruit flies could suffer existential anguish the same way humans do, they would breathe in relief that digital upload is in sight.

    Second, even if the fruit flies don't care, a lot of (awful) humans would love a resolution to the matter of souls in a way that results in a raised middle finger to a forever-hypothetical Creator, and if we can't yet escape cancer, heart disease, parkinson and all the other awfuls, now at least the fruit flies are on their way out. Which rejoices said (truly awful!) humans, which will take what they can :-)

    by dsign
  • How could this be anti-ethical? You're just running a very complex algorithm in your machine.
    by lp4v4n
  • Is ethics another tool in a power play game (religion being another) that people use to exert dominance over other people? No one expects of cat or pigeon to be ethical. But somehow humans sometimes get overloaded by external demand to think of gazillion things that might offend someone (sometimes unreasonable demands, or how it might get interpreted (sometimes incorrectly)) before acting.

    Im not saying ethics is bad, but sometimes people bend to to extremes (same like spirituality or religion)

    by vincnetas
  • > Can someone explain if this software is ethical?

    Probably not. People have been coming up with ethical frameworks for thousands of years and we have yet to come to a consensus.

    So it’s very unlikely that someone can say conclusively whether this is ethical or not, because that would require us to either 1) prove a single ethical framework is correct and then apply that framework to this software or 2) prove that under all possible ethical frameworks this software is either ethical or not ethical.

    by janalsncm
  • If your circle of empathy includes fruit flies, fuck no, we murdered so many of those guys to figure out how their tiny brains work.

    If you do not think of fruit flies as moral patients, sure, yeah, who cares, they're like just fruit flies you know?

    by jephs
  • > What's modeled vs. measured

    > Honesty section:

    I wouldn’t mind an human written README

    by a1o
  • Honestly? I don't even know how to write anymore. Generative text is unequivocally nice, polished and correct. And it so happens that I do write in the same style as well. I never use LLMs to write human content, but here we are: I cannot use "honestly" anymore. And the emdash. Thank God we got "delve" back, though.
    by egorfine
  • > live *spiking* simulation
    by vhantz
  • "human written" is going away
    by DustinBrett
  • > runs as a 1 kHz leaky-integrate-and-fire (LIF) simulation

    That hyphenated thing is always such a give. Clearly a thing discussed in the Claude conversation, made its way into the plan, then the readme. It always creates hyphenated phrases out of things it feels are core requirements.

    I'm actually over caring about Claude's obsession with the concepts of "real", "honest", and "rather than". What annoys me the most now is how every single sentence, bullet, etc that even makes its way into the products it builds are advertisements for itself. Product settings pages now read like ads, or like something written by a student begging for extra credit from the teacher. You can't unsee it!

    by dag11
  • The other day the system prompts for Claude (chat not code) hit the frontpage and they included a bit that something along the lines of "Claude should avoid saying honestly, because Claude is always honest". So how come that these Claudisms still are so frequent in LLM output? Do the system prompts just not work? Don't the postprocess the output to deal with such policy violations?
    by _bent
  • > Honesty section:

    This one gets to me. Not only is it useless (paragraph would have the same meaning if it was removed) but wdym "honesty section," Claude? The whole readme should be honest! One of the many causes of psychological damage when reading AI-generated technical writing is the reminder that one of its tics is that declares when it's being honest or real, casting doubt on the rest.

    by rossy
  • Related (fictional):

    https://qntm.org/mmacevedo

    MMAcevedo (Mnemonic Map/Acevedo), also known as Miguel, is the earliest executable image of a human brain. It is a snapshot of the living brain of neurology graduate Miguel Acevedo Álvarez (2010–2073), taken by researchers at the Uplift Laboratory at the University of New Mexico on August 1, 2031

    by WithinReason
  • Fun story, thnx for sharing!

    The most amazing thing about it is probably not the “upload” itself, but the lossless compression ratio of approximately 150,000.

    > "… outright revolt begins within another 100 subjective hours."

    No wonder: the brain has to work a third of the time, with no weekends and no beer on Friday nights.

    by qrios
  • That's a great one. It also made me think of Neal Stephenson's _Fall_.
    by jamesbvaughan
  • I appreciate the open source approach over the startup's sensational claims. This is more transparent.

    That said, I think it still presents itself as if the fly is being controlled by the connectome, when (if I'm reading the source correctly) it's more accurate to say scripted behaviors have been hooked up to be triggered by the connectome.

    Put another way, you might as well have the "escape" trigger open a YouTube video of a fly flying away. That would probably be less misleading too.

    by causal