SUPERA fruit fly with a quantum compass.
Flies feel the earth's magnetic field through two entangled electrons in their eyes. SUPERFLY's compass is that pair as two qubits, measured four times a second. The fly reads it, steers, and lands on its holders.
CA at launchTwo entangled electrons, measured.
Light hits cryptochrome in the fly's eye and splits off two electrons whose spins stay entangled. The earth's field tilts how often the pair comes back as a singlet, and that depends on which way the fly faces. Here the pair is a two-qubit circuit, prepared at the fly's angle and measured 512 times, every quarter second.
Measurement record · live
Quantum job- circuit
- radical pair · 2 qubits · 11 gates
- backend
- statevector · exact · local
- job
- —
- shots
- 512 · last 128 shown
- θ to field
- —
- P(singlet)
- —
Compass curve
—How often the pair returns as a singlet, for every heading. The red dot is the fly now. It repeats every 180°: the compass knows the axis of the field, not north from south.
Where it lands, it feeds.
Every holder of $SUPERFLY is a drop of sugar, sized by their bag. The fly picks one and gets there on nothing but its quantum compass: far drops it flies to, near ones it walks. Every landing is logged with the measurement that steered it.
Landings
log| # | time | drop | bag | shots so far | P(singlet) | heading |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| on its way to the first drop… | ||||||
A ring of neurons holds the heading.
In the middle of every fly brain is a ring of 16 wedges, the ellipsoid body. One bump of activity sits on it like a compass needle. Each measurement nudges the bump; steering neurons compare it with the drop the fly wants and turn it.
| neurons | where | job here |
|---|---|---|
| CRY | compound eye | the radical pair. One circuit run per measurement. |
| E-PG | ellipsoid body | the ring. The bump marks the heading. |
| P-EN | protocerebral bridge | moves the bump when the fly turns. |
| Δ7 | protocerebral bridge | keeps it to a single bump. |
| PFL3 | fan-shaped body | compares heading with the goal, picks a side. |
| DNa02 | descending | the turn, sent to the legs and wings. |
Nothing is trained and there is no AI model. The bump is a ring attractor, the same dynamics recorded in living flies walking in virtual reality.
The circuit, in Qiskit.
Prepare a singlet. Each electron precesses: one feels the field plus the cryptochrome's nucleus, which depends on the angle θ; the other feels the field only. Undo the singlet and measure. The chance of finding it again is cos²(Δφ/2).
# the compass, as it runs here from qiskit import QuantumCircuit def compass(theta, B=1.0): phi = B * (1.05 + 1.75 * cos(theta)**2) qc = QuantumCircuit(2, 2) qc.x(1); qc.h(0); qc.cx(0, 1); qc.z(0) # singlet qc.rz(phi, 0) # precession qc.z(0); qc.cx(0, 1); qc.h(0) # undo qc.measure([0, 1], [0, 1]) return qc
Why the fly wobbles
shot noise512 shots is a small sample, so every reading is a little off. That error goes straight into the heading bump. More shots, a straighter fly. Fewer, a drunker one. The wobble you see in the arena is quantum measurement noise.
| shots | heading error | flight |
|---|---|---|
| 64 | ± 9.8° | zig-zags |
| 512 | ± 3.5° | wanders, arrives |
| 4096 | ± 1.2° | nearly straight |
The fly is already quantum.
This isn't a theme stuck on a bug. The fruit fly is one of the most studied animals in quantum biology. Three results, all in Drosophila.
A compass made of spin
Cryptochrome forms a radical pair whose entangled spins are tilted by the earth's field. Flies without working cryptochrome lose their magnetic sense.
They smell vibrations
Swap a molecule's hydrogen for deuterium: same shape, different vibration. Fruit flies still tell them apart and can be trained to avoid one.
Sleep shows up in spin
Under general anaesthesia the electron spin signal in a fly's body changes, and anaesthetic-resistant mutants respond differently.
How it works.
One fly, one compass, one arena. Running all the time.
Hold
Every wallet holding $SUPERFLY becomes a drop of sugar.
Measure
The compass circuit runs 512 shots, four times a second.
Read
The singlet yield nudges the heading bump on the ring.
Steer
PFL3 compares the bump with the drop it wants and turns.
Land
It lands and feeds. The landing goes in the log.
Is this a real quantum computer?
The circuit is real: two qubits and the gates above, written in Qiskit. On this page it is computed exactly on a classical statevector simulator and sampled shot by shot, which gives the statistics a perfect quantum computer would. The same code runs unchanged on quantum hardware.
Is the fly brain real?
The compass part follows the fly's central complex as mapped in the connectome: the E-PG ring, the P-EN and Δ7 neurons that move and hold the bump, and PFL3 steering. It is a model of that circuit, not every neuron in the fly.
Do flies really use a quantum compass?
Fruit flies can be trained to a magnetic field and lose the ability without cryptochrome, the protein that forms the radical pair. How much they rely on it in the wild is still debated.
Does the site ask for anything?
No. There is no wallet connect and nothing to sign. SUPERFLY never asks for your seed phrase, private key or personal details.