Engineer turns simulated fly brain into a crypto day trader, posts downloadable sim to GitHub — 166,700 virtual neurons read candlestick charts for dopamine hits

Simulating animal brains seems to be the latest buzz. Hot on the heels of teaching a fly to play Doom, an engineer from the Coinbase cryptocurrency service has elected to turn one into a day trader with Stonkfly. If you want to see Stonk trade live, you can watch here.

The open-source project has a simulation of a male fruit fly brain and eyes, and shows it a standard-issue candlestick graph with historical pricing. The fly can choose to buy, sell, or hold any given currency — although they get shown to the fly in round-robin fashion — and gets rewarded for profitable trading.

A rising portfolio value triggers a dopamine rush as a positive reinforcement signal to 15 cells, while a loss lights up two aversive cells. Trading fees count as losses. The author notes there are no pain or emotional mechanisms at play. Displaying far better judgement than most human traders, the fly cannot use leveraged positions (trading multipliers) or shorts (betting on drops).

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The brain has 166,700 neurons and 25.6 million connections. The virtual fly sees the graph as a 320x180 display across its left and right eyes, with an intersecting center portion. The simulated photoreceptor cells get fed the RGB pixel values rather than pricing information. By default, the fly "thinks" and acts every 500 ms, and the market data gets refreshed every 60 seconds, and it can bet up to $10 on any one order, up to 24 times a day.