This sort of article is really interesting to me, both for the subject matter, and for the fact that someone can deeply embed themselves into advanced scientific topics like this. OK, to be clear, it wasn't a real fly that played Pong, it was a real fly connectome from the recently released MaleCNS v1.0, "the first complete wiring diagram of an adult male fruit fly's brain and central nervous system... released publicly through neuPrint." Neuprint is a whole world worth exploring in itself, but I digress. Anyhow, the result was that the fruit fly model did not learn as it played Pong. Why not? The article traces a few obvious approaches, but as the author argues, "a wiring diagram isn't automatically a working circuit for a task it wasn't built for." It might be, in other words, that fruit fly brains are incapable of learning to play Pong.
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