Simulated Fly Brain Trades Bitcoin with Virtual Dopamine
A team of developers has successfully wired a digital copy of a fruit fly's brain into a Bitcoin trading account. The project, called Stonkfly, uses an open-source platform to simulate a 166,700-neuron model with roughly 25.6 million connections between them.
The simulated brain is based on the wiring map of an adult male fruit fly's nervous system, which was published by neuroscientists after years of research. The team pointed this digital copy at a candlestick chart and trained it to make buy, sell, or hold decisions.
Profitable trades reward 15 neurons with virtual dopamine, while losses trigger two neurons that register something unpleasant. However, the system cannot borrow or bet on a falling price, giving it an edge over some AI bots trading stocks.
Alex Wormuth, the Coinbase engineer behind the project, emphasized that this experiment does not prove anything about the fly's ability to learn and trade profitably. The program runs with paper money by default, starting with $100, and live mode caps each order at $10, limiting attempts to 24 per day.