Dev log
The other day I was working on House of Hex in the middle of the night, most photons coming from nowhere but my monitors and keyboard underlight. I had my window open for some time prior but not at that moment. Suddenly I saw a dark blob repeatedly crashing into my second monitor. I knew it was a fly due to its size, but it made me say in my head: "huh, a feedforward network." It's fairly odd to say something like that about a fly, but it was due to my amateur-level work on reinforcement learning agents and learning strategies, like PPO.
Connectome, n.: "A connectome is a complete graph of a neural network. In principle, it is not an approximation or even a statistical average. It is a comprehensive list of every connection in a defined neural region."
https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/medicine-and-dentistry/connectome
As I was observing the fly, I remembered that there was now a complete map, a connectome, of the nervous system of this fly. I went online to look for it and lost myself in reading about the research, how they mapped it, and the data available under an open license. I got about ~16Gi of that data right away, knowing that I'd have fun experimenting with it. Ever since I was a kid, I had an interest in what I later learnt was called reinforcement learning, seeking things like the Tamagotchi but capable of independent existence without constant user input.
While the download was in progress, I thought that there could be more such connectomes than just that of a fly, so I searched. I didn't find any more complete ones but I found cubic millimeter scans of the brain of humans and a mouse, which I also downloaded. There is some work done on cats as well, but it's weak. Nevertheless, I downloaded that as well.
Once all downloads finished, I took inventory of what I had and found neuron and synaptic mapping tables and identities, pairing them to particular regions of the respective brain, which got me excited to try it out on some of my existing RL work.
I want to put serious time into this, so I decided to start a new roadmap item in the form of a free DLC item (since that's how I manage and communicate Crosstalk's roadmap), which will be announced once it goes through Valve's review. Nearly all my waking time goes toward Crosstalk or something related to Crosstalk, so whenever something like this happens and I get excited about it, especially if I can see it running on MISC, I want to make something usable out of it. A similar thing happened at the time of writing of this post.