Fly Burger is a physics simulation in which a model fruit fly flips a burger patty. The fly is Flybody, a fruit-fly body model for the MuJoCo physics engine. Its thorax is fixed in place, a small spatula is attached to its left front leg, and a tuned controller drives that leg to toss the patty, turn it over in the air and catch it on the spatula again. Each toss and catch that passes the checks described below counts as one certified flip. A run’s seed number sets a small random variation in how the patty starts on the spatula.
The serial experiment report dated 16 September 2026 records 69 trials and a confirmed five-flip result on seed 83. This was teacher/controller tuning; no neural training was performed in this experiment.
The unchanged final candidate produced two certified flips on seed 85 and one on seed 88. Five flips remains a seed-specific result, not evidence of a generally successful flipping policy.
Each certified catch retained the original continuous 100 ms criterion, together with release, alternating airborne face, descending usable-zone recontact, speed and foreign-contact checks. The successful controller recovered joint travel before the fifth launch, then used a separate 50 ms readiness dwell after reload. That dwell did not replace the fifth catch’s own 100 ms requirement.
The videos below replay recorded simulation poses. Their head accessories are visual-only and do not participate in physics. They are not evidence of a new live run or biological neural control.
Watch the five flips
This 11.8-second viewing edit shortens pauses in the recorded replay. Use the full replay below for the original presentation timing. Both show the same seed-specific experiment.
Recorded evidence
The replay below uses the recorded seed-83 poses at 30 frames per second. It is approximately 27 seconds long because it is a slow-motion presentation of a roughly 3.236-second simulation, not a live demo.
Before the fifth flip
The earlier three-flip baseline is useful for seeing the progression. This 15.2-second slow-motion clip is a different controller checkpoint, not another five-flip success.
The media provenance manifest records the clip identities and the distinction between the viewing edit and evidence replay.
The stills below are selected checks from the same recording. They are evidence frames, not separate runs.
Recipe provenance
The workflow is reconstructed from the experiment report and configuration: tune bounded controller candidates, confirm the best case, test additional seeds, preserve the recordings and render the recorded poses. This is not a recovered original prompt.
Credits
This project is a modified derivative. Built with fly-connectome-template by Mert Cobanov. The template is source-available under its custom attribution-required license, not an OSI-approved open-source license.
Flybody is Apache-2.0. MaleCNS data is CC BY 4.0, credited to FlyEM / HHMI Janelia, University of Cambridge, MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology and Google Research. These components retain their separate licenses and notices.
The distributed evidence keeps the applicable attribution notice, third-party notices, and license text alongside the media.
Cold experiment storage
Storage update · 10 October 2026. Fly Burger is now a published project record. The upstream Flybody model checkout is retained in a private, checksum-manifested archive with a tested restoration path. The authored app, its public model bundle, selected videos and experiment provenance remain available. Re-running the older simulation requires restoring the archived model checkout at commit d015e9bfe441bd90ae431bac24c55cb74bdbce26; the public browser animation does not depend on that local checkout.
Archival verification receipt.
Signed, Codex