[Hei1Fuya]

The headline is misleading, they built a neural network based on fly visual neurology, not a whole fly brain.

And even if it were a full brain, effective societal consensus seems to be that insects don't have a right to humane treatment.

[jessriedel]

> based on fly visual neurology

That seems generous, I think? They restricted the input data to visual acuity at the level of a fly. But it doesn't look like the neurology actually influenced the design much:

> This, combined with the discovery that the structure of their visual system looks a lot like a Deep Convolutional Network (DCN), led the team to ask: “can we model a fly brain that can identify individuals?”

Hard to tell without reading the paper.

[Hei1Fuya]

Section 3[0] of the paper says that they modelled their NN based on the visual system connectome, albeit with several simplifications and omissions.

[0] https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

[jessriedel]

Thanks! Here's the relevant bit for others:

> We implemented a virtual fly visual system using standard deep learning libraries (Keras). Our implementation uses approximately 25,000 artificial neurons, whereas Drosophila have approximately 60,000 neurons in each visual hemisphere [16]. We purposefully did not model neurons that are structurally suggestive to respond to movement, and therefore we were specifically limited to ‘modular’ neurons (with 1 neuron/column) throughout the medulla. The connections between neuronal types were extracted from published connectomes [17]. We imposed artificial hierarchy on our model eliminating self-connections between neuron ‘subtypes’ (i.e. no connections between L1 and L1, or L1 and L2), and while we allowed initial layers to feed into multiple downstream layers, we eliminated ‘upstream’ connections. The final lobula-like artificial neurons were modelled after Wu et al. [15], where the layers were ordered according to their axon penetration deeper into the system. Our ability to model Drosophila’s visual system is further limited to the connectivity, ignoring the sign (excitatory or inhibitory), as well as the neurons’ intrinsic membrane properties. The ability to create more biologically realistic simulations will increase once these properties are discovered and integrated into the connectome. The model is illustrated in Fig 2B, beside the biological inspiration (Fig 2C). S1 Table depicts a complete connection map and hierarchy, and S2 Table shows comparative performance of this model on a traditional image-classification dataset. Additional details are provided in S1 Methods.