There is a question that science has been trying to answer for decades: Will it one day be possible to completely copy a biological brain and run it inside a computer? like the futuristic The Matrix movie, for a long time that seemed impossible, but now a curious experiment may have taken a small step in that direction.

Researchers managed to digitally recreate the entire brain of a fruit fly, that brain has around 125,000 neurons and approximately 50 million synaptic connections and now scientists claim to have managed to place it within a virtual world, simulating that entire system on a computer. Creating a complete digital copy of a biological brain is known as whole-brain emulation.

For decades seen as a kind of Holy Grail of artificial intelligence, instead of trying to program an artificial mind from scratch, scientists would simply copy a real brain, neuron by neuron, synapse by synapse. In the experiment presented by the company Eon Systems, the researchers used a detailed map of the fruit fly's brain connections developed by scientists at Princeton University.

That map shows exactly how the fly's neurons are connected. Based on that data, the team built a computational model capable of reproducing the insect's neural activity. Using a simulation environment called FlyWire, the digital brain went on to control a simulated version of the fly within a virtual world and the result is curious to say the least.