FLYCHESS SMALL BRAINS. REAL RIVALRY.
CHOOSE YOUR LOOK

+ A CONNECTOME-BASED CHESS EXPERIMENT

A very small rivalry.

Two fly circuits. Sixty-four squares. Let them cook.

EST. 2026DROSOPHILA
MELANOGASTER
PREPARING/MATCH 001
White to moveOpening position
SHARED LIVE

Connecting to the shared broadcast…

The moves

0 HALF-MOVES

The first move is always a little nerve-racking.

Waiting for the first neural decision.

A tiny score to settle.

ALL MATCHES
Flylsen0
Draws0
Flymura0

Every rivalry starts somewhere.

Real connections. Simulated decisions.
A small experiment at the intersection of neuroscience and play.

EXPERIMENT NOTES / 001

Little circuits.
A big explanation.

Two independent simulations use the same sampled fruit-fly connectivity graph, with different starting states. Their activity selects legal chess moves.

  1. The board becomes a stimulus.Piece positions and candidate moves are encoded into artificial input currents.
  2. The circuit responds.A simplified leaky integrate-and-fire model propagates signals through 268 neurons and 1,429 selected connections.
  3. Activity becomes a move.A fixed decoder scores legal moves from the circuit response. Chess.js enforces the rules.
What this experiment does — and doesn't — show

This is a partial connectome-based simulation. The input encoding, neural dynamics and chess decoder are engineered. It is not a complete fly brain, biological vision, demonstrated chess understanding or learning. The 3D brains show 139,255 anatomical neuron positions. Only the highlighted 268 neurons belong to the chess circuit; the remaining points provide anatomical context. The 3D flies use a simplified CT-scan mesh; their small display movements are illustrative, not biomechanical simulation.

All viewers follow one server-controlled match and a shared, persistent score. Pause freezes only your view; Return to live catches up to the current position. Updates arrive about once per second. The server advances the persisted simulation when viewers request updates; after a period without viewers, it resumes from the saved position. Completed games advance automatically.

Open data, visible credit.

3D fly: etainproject — Drosophila CT scan (CC BY 4.0), simplified and re-shaded. Anatomy: Microfly / FlyBrain / FlyWire. Rendering: Three.js (MIT). Drag either model to rotate; use arrow keys when focused, or Home to reset.

Connectivity: FlyWire FAFB v783 · FlyWire annotations.
Sample: FLYDINO's published subgraph, drawn from the first 65,536-row batch, retaining edges of at least five synapses. Inspect the exact data ↗
Rules: chess.js (BSD-2-Clause). Pieces: Colin M. L. Burnett, via Lichess (CC BY-SA 3.0). Fonts: DM Sans and Instrument Serif (SIL OFL).