Fly Number Recognition

A hundred real neurons and 3,630 real connections compiled into a recurrent network in PyTorch, trained to say whether a stream of ten digits contained a 6 or a 7. Gradient descent may change a connection's strength but may never invent one that the animal does not have. It works, and the author leads with the part that deflates it: a degree-preserving rewiring of the same neurons learns the task exactly as well, so the result is about connectome-constrained learning in general and not about this fly. A viewer replays the trained activity on the real neuron positions.

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#connectome-constrained#negative-result#rewiring#pytorch#recurrent#malecns