Coinbase Engineer Simulates Fly Brain to Trade Bitcoin in Experimental Project
A Coinbase software engineer has created an open-source project called Stonkfly, which simulates the brain of a fruit fly to trade Bitcoin.
The digital copy of the fly's brain is made up of 166,700 neurons and approximately 25.6 million connections between them, based on a published wiring map of an adult male fruit fly's nervous system.
The simulated brain reads chart pixels from a price chart displayed as a small image across its two 'eyes', and settles on buy, sell, or hold based on the raw pixel colors.
When the fly makes a profitable trade, 15 reward neurons are fired. A loss triggers two neurons that register something unpleasant, and trading fees count as losses.
The creator of Stonkfly, Alex Wormuth, emphasized that the project does not prove anything about real-world trading skills, stating 'Synaptic changes do not establish that it learns to trade profitably.'