Originally published as an Advisory Hour Substack post on 2026-09-22. This first-party site copy preserves the text, localizes public supporting media, and connects the record to its project trail.
Original post
This post assumes you know that an entire insect brain is available for download. This article shows an outcome of having that brain connected to a robot to then play a videogame. … The singularity is a weird time for all.
The robot from islandlab gets a brain that’s capable of playing the Summer into AI entry Reverebike. Reverebike is a 1776 inpsired clone of Excitebike. You can learn more about this and play it here. In this article we’re going to talk about training flybrains to play video games. Yes, I attached the digitized brain of a fly to a robot and taught it to play excitebike. It’s quite good at it, which has inspired me to begin “Flylab” to do further experiments with this insect brain.
In the Flylab for this project you can observe the network thinking in different ways. You can also import your own modified or mutated brain to try with the robot. Handy, say, if you’re an agent and want to do a series of experiments. The entire runtime for this runs on the edge, so you can scale to the limitations of your CPU compute. There’s no GPU processing here.
Here’s the champion highscores if you’re looking to train your own Flybrain. This is what the brain will do out of the box (with what’s provided).
You can download the Flybrain yourself from the Flylab site. I’m giving thought to pushing a few variations of this up to Huggingface in an upcoming weekend. In the meantime, take the brain and may the Fly be with you.
If you watch the robot, you’ll see animations and reactions ported over from islandlab v4. It’s uncanny how well those behaviors and animation cycles translated over from that project into this one. Clearly this robot has a lot more room to grow!
What a wild ride.
This project expanded my mind on what is possible with AI-and after so many experiments one would think I’d have seen pretty much everything. This is why we do things: there’s always a new door to open, and a new room to explore.
There is something eerily capable with the Flybrain. Give the robot brain arcade a poke and take a brain home with you. It’s free.