COMPOUND EYE BRIGADEOmmatidia

AUTO · follows the action

128 brain regions · spike rate over time

24 senses going in

Waiting for the first spikes…

FLYLAB · EXPERIMENT 03

Tank Warfare

Two armies. Eight tanks. Eight complete fruit-fly connectomes — 166,700 neurons and 25.5 million synapses each — running live in your browser. The Compound Eye Brigade meets the Red Mosca Battalion on a golden-hour steppe. Best of five rounds. No scripted driving. Watch them, or take a tank and see if you can out-drive a fly.

Rolling out the battlefield…

The modes unlock when the brains are awake. Driving: W A S D, Shift to rush, mouse to aim, click or Space to fire, F for smoke, P to pause. On a phone: thumbstick, drag to aim, FIRE and SMOKE buttons. First visit downloads the 138.6 MB brain map once (shared with the other FlyLab experiments, cached afterwards).

How the tanks think

Senses. Each tank turns the battlefield into 24 egocentric signals: where its waypoint and target are, whether its gun is on target and loaded, whether it has a clear line, whether an enemy gun is pointed at it, whether a shell is inbound, how much armour is left, what is in front of the hull.
Brain. Those signals are injected as current into 48 groups of visual neurons in that tank's own copy of the fruit-fly connectome (MaleCNS v1.0, via flybrain 0.1.0). The whole 166,700-neuron leaky integrate-and-fire network then steps forward.
Readout. A 64-unit readout — the same recipe as the Robot Brain Arcade and Fly Brain Soccer — listens to 376 brain signals and picks one of 12 motor programs: hold, advance, veer, rush, pivot, reverse, fire or pop smoke.
Teacher. The readout was trained offline by imitating a scripted tank commander while the brains ran (DAgger rounds where the brain drives and the commander only labels). In battle the commander is switched off: the hulls, the trigger and the smoke are the brains' calls, noise and all.
Crew. A tactics layer picks each tank's target and hands it a waypoint, like a compass heading, and a gunner keeps the turret slewed on the target. Armour is real: the sloped front plate can bounce shells, sides and rear do not. Smoke and cover block sight lines; wrecks become cover.
Performance. Every tank has a little commander bot in its hatch with an LED face that squints when it fires, ducks when a shell comes in and cheers a kill. The hulls squash on recoil and rock on their springs.

Rendered with three.js r187 on WebGPU, falling back to WebGL 2 where a browser doesn't have WebGPU (the meter shows which). On desktops the picture adds ground-truth ambient occlusion, a light sun-scattering haze from the shadow map, smoke that fades softly into the ground, bloom and FXAA; phones get bloom and FXAA. Earth, plaster, straw, thatch and the tanks' chalky camo use r187's diffuseRoughness (energy-preserving Oren–Nayar) shading. Address options for comparing: ?fx=high|low|off, ?webgl=1, ?diffuse=lambert. The fly brains don't use the GPU at all; they run on the CPU either way.

All eight brains share one copy of the wiring and run on your CPU in Web Workers. Sound effects were generated with ElevenLabs. The battlefield borrows the golden-hour steppe of GameLab's Kursk — Steel & Thunder; the field notebook map borrows the ballpoint of Margin Aces.

Human vs fly. Pick Duel, Squad or Last stand under Modes and drive a tank yourself. The fly brains get exactly the same senses about your tank as they get about each other, and the brain cam follows whichever fly is in your sights. Your record against the flies is kept in this browser.

Between matches. Seven and his drone Mote, from TiltLab's Pick of the Patch, keep a pumpkin patch just west of the wire. When a match ends the camera cuts over: Mote scans a few pumpkins, picks the best one, and Seven pulls the wagon over to collect it. The Pumpkins camera (5) checks in on them any time. Turn it off with ?patch=0.

Keys: 1–4 cameras · 5 pumpkin patch · Space pause (fire when you drive) · P pause · M sound · H clean view · N notebook map · click any tank (or its tile) to watch its brain. Driving: W A S D, Shift rush, mouse aim, click or Space fire, F smoke, Q/E turn the view.

FlyLab home · Read the Tank Warfare story · Fly Brain Soccer · Robot Brain Arcade · Connectome credits