I tried to make a real fly connectome learn to play Pong. It didn't — and auditing why turned out to be way more interesting than if it had worked [p]

You've probably seen the fly-brain-plays-Doom / Minecraft / Beat Saber clips going around this week, from the new MaleCNS v1.0 connectome release (166k neurons, real EM reconstruction, not a toy model). Cool clips. Nobody seemed to be checking whether any of it works though, versus just producing motion in a game engine generous enough to make anything look alive. So I picked the least forgiving test bed around: Pong, one binary hit or miss signal measured every frame, nowhere to hide a null result, and tried to get a small real subgraph of the connectome to track the ball via dopamine-style p