ChessFly: a fruit fly teaches itself chess

Opponent

You play

The fly looks ahead

Show the moves it considered

Inside its head

Each lit square on the left is one input: a piece on a square, from the fly's side of the board. In a real-wired fly two or three inputs share each of its 285 projection neurons. Any Kenyon cell that gets two active projection neurons fires. The output neuron adds up the synapses of the cells that fired, and that sum is the fly's whole opinion of the position.

What it has figured out

Nobody told it what pieces are worth. These are the values it arrived at on its own, in pawns; textbook values in grey.

Strength on the ChessFly scale (a random mover is 400). Dashed lines are the fixed exam opponents: Greedy grabs the biggest capture, Counter and Sentinel count material 1 and 2 moves ahead.