SPECIMEN MALE CNS V1.0 — NEURONS — CONNECTIONS SITTING — BRAIN TIME — connecting — UTC
surrogate graph loaded — a random network, not the connectome · nothing painted here is minted

Canvas Fly · one token per sitting · Robinhood Chain

A real fly brain paints.
The paintings are minted.

Every connection in this thing was traced from electron microscope images of an actual male fruit fly. 165,122 neurons integrate, the descending neurons a fly walks with move a brush, and the shape of the activity picks the colour. The fly paints what it sees and sees what it paints. When a sitting ends the picture is hashed, minted on Robinhood Chain and listed on OpenSea. Nobody draws.

the live canvas
live canvas · sitting —
—
brush —
what the retina sees
the fly's eye · 892 columns
between sittings
watch a recorded sitting the gallery
neurons firing
—
of — · this window
spikes / s
—
membrane — mV
strokes
—
— lifts · — reversals
brain time
—
of — s · window — ms wall
neural activity firing neurons · soma positions 2,000 sampled
optic lobecentral brain VNCdescending (read by the brush) Kenyon cells
descending neurons → brush spikes per second —
DNa02 L | R
0 | 0
DNa01 fwd
0
MDN back
0
DNp09 stop
0
palette from the brain
optic — · central — · VNC —
Kenyon — → saturation · rate → lightness
mushroom body learning
depressed
0
mean gain — · rewards — · punishments —
KC→MBON synapses under dopamine. Depression only — that is the rule a fly actually uses.
studio log newest first
  • —waiting for the studio

Latest sittings

Fresh off the easel

What it is

A real nervous system, not a metaphor

The male Drosophila central nervous system connectome was released in September 2026 by HHMI Janelia FlyEM, the Cambridge Connectomics Group and Google Research under CC-BY 4.0. We keep the 165,122 neurons marked traced, drop pairs with fewer than three synapses, and take each connection's sign from its predicted neurotransmitter — acetylcholine excites, GABA and glutamate inhibit. The neurons run as leaky integrate-and-fire units after Shiu et al. 2024: rest −52 mV, threshold −45 mV, 20 ms tau.

Nothing is invented and nothing is sampled from a distribution. It is not a neural network "inspired by" a brain. The wiring is never trained; the only free parameters are one gain per cell type, and even those are left at 1.0 unless a gains file says otherwise.

How it paints

It sees with a fly's eye and moves with a fly's legs

01 · see

A 256 px patch of the canvas around the brush is sampled through 892 retinotopic hex columns into L1 (ON) and L2 (OFF) — the lamina cells behind photoreceptors R1–R6. The column map comes from the release's own optic-lobe column assignments.

02 · integrate

All 165,122 neurons run for 10 ms of brain time per window, 0.2 ms steps. A spike adds sign × synapses × 0.275 mV to every target. Cost tracks how many neurons fire, not the population.

03 · move

DNa02 left-vs-right asymmetry steers. DNa01 drives forward. MDN, the moonwalker neuron, walks the brush backwards. DNp09 makes a fly freeze, so here it lifts the brush.

04 · colour

Hue is the mix of optic lobe, central brain and VNC in the window's spikes. Saturation is the Kenyon-cell share. Lightness is the rate. Width is forward drive. A person chose that mapping, and it never changes.

05 · learn

Fresh canvas rewards, the edge punishes — through PAM and PPL1 dopamine cells onto KC→MBON synapses, depression only. Reward-side MBONs are found from wiring, not typed in.

06 · mint

When the sitting's brain time is spent the PNG is hashed. mint() writes the hash and the seed on Robinhood Chain next to the token, the picture lands in the keeper's wallet and is listed on OpenSea. Replay the seed, get the same pixels.

The plan

How it got here

Not a roadmap of promises — a sequence, with everything above the amber line already done and checkable in the repo.

01
Connectome loaded165,122 traced neurons, signed edges from predicted transmitters, built from the public release with run.py build
done
02
Eye wired892 hex columns into L1 and L2, mapped through the release's own column assignments
done
03
Hands wiredDNa02, DNa01, MDN and DNp09 driving a brush over a 1024 px canvas
done
04
Score recordedevery window of every sitting written down, so a painting replays in any browser without the brain running
done
05
Reward loop closedKC→MBON synapses under dopamine, novelty as the reward, the edge as the punishment
done
06
Contract on Robinhood ChainConnectomeCanvas.sol: owner-only mint, PNG hash and seed stored per token, 5 % royalty. Gas on Robinhood Chain is a fraction of a cent
deploying
07
First sitting minted and listedthe painter mints, the token lands in the keeper's wallet, and the keeper lists it by hand on OpenSea — a signature, no fee
next
08
Trained gainsevolution strategy over per-type gains toward paintings that cover more canvas without repeating themselves
next

What is not real, stated plainly

The parts that aren't the fly

The brush is a translation.A fly has legs, not a brush. Steering, forward, backward and stop are read from the real descending neurons, but "brush down" and stroke width are a mapping a person wrote.
Colour is not a fly decision.A fly has no notion of paint. Colour is read off which populations carried the spikes, with anchor hues chosen by a person. The mapping is fixed and public.
The reward is invented.The circuit, the plasticity site and the direction of the rule are real and measured. What a fly is rewarded by is sugar, not by covering fresh canvas.
Background noise is a modelling choice.0.1 % of neurons receive a small random kick each step so the network never falls silent. It is seeded, so it replays identically.
Gains are untrained today.Every cell-type gain is 1.0. Training them is step 08. The pictures you see are the anatomy as released, nothing more.
It has no goals.A fly brain has no language and no plan. It cannot see the picture as a picture. Nobody is steering — that is the point, not a claim that it decided anything.

On chain

Canvas Fly · CFLY

One ERC-721 per sitting, minted by the painter's own wallet on Robinhood Chain. Next to every token the contract stores the SHA-256 of the PNG and the sitting's seed, so provenance is checked against the block, not against this page. Listings are made by hand on OpenSea, which indexes Robinhood Chain.

contractnot deployed yet chainRobinhood Chain · id 4663 standardERC-721 + ERC-2981 (5 % royalty) · owner-only mint(to, uri, pngSha256, seed) collectionOpenSea link appears after the first mint minting—