A simulated fruit-fly brain with 138,639 neurons mapped from the FlyWire connectome plays the grand strategy game Open Doctrines in real-time in a browser. The brain receives sensory inputs based on game events and produces commands that control a country's actions, though it performs poorly at strategy since it evolved for survival, not governance.
A new study led by researchers at Princeton University found that AI agents cannot yet conduct open-ended AI research, despite being capable of solving engineering problems. While AI can write code and optimize systems, it lacks the creativity and judgment needed to produce original research at the caliber of top machine-learning conferences, suggesting timelines for recursive self-improvement may be overstated.
Google mapped an adult male fruit fly's brain into a 3D model containing 166,000 neurons, prompting engineers to train it to play Doom, Beat Saber, Mario 64, and Minecraft. Similar brain mapping projects like Flywire have enabled comparable applications, raising questions about future possibilities for replicating human neural structures.
The Langlands program, launched by mathematician Robert Langlands in 1967, is a decades-long effort to discover and exploit mathematical correspondences between distant areas of mathematics, such as number theory and harmonic analysis. Often called a "grand unified theory of mathematics," it reveals unexpected connections and symmetries across mathematical domains, though even experts struggle to articulate its full meaning and scope.