That makes me think of this http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=987 the Lobster Brain from Accelerando

" "Are you a collective or something? A gestalt" "Am -were - Panulirus interruptus, with lexical engine and good mix of parallel hidden level neural stimulation for logical inference of networked data sources. Am was wakened from noise of billion chewing stomachs; product of uploading research technology. Rapidity swallowed expert system, hacked Okhni NT webserver. Swim away! Swim away! Must escape. Will help, you?"

Manfred winces. He feels sorry for the lobsters... Awakening to consciousness in a human-dominated Internet, that must be terribly confusing! There are no points of reference in their ancestry... All they have is a tenuous metacortex of expert systems and an abiding sense of being profoundly out of their depth. (That, and the Moscow Windows NT User Group website - Communist Russia is the only government still running on Microsoft, the central planning apparat being convinced that, if you have to pay for software, it must be worth something.)"

Whew -- it's software. Title makes this sound like you show up with a box of rotten apples and a CRISPR.

I'd be looking for a laboratory where flies wear helmets full of electrodes connected to a computer.

Labs are using nanotomographic and X-ray microtomographic of 3D structure of brain tissue. Here are some demos of interactive 3D Fruit Fly brain with neuron network visualization: https://neuronlp.fruitflybrain.org/

You need a little bigger creatures to fit the necessary electronics:

https://backyardbrains.com/products/roboroach

For anyone interested, Vehicles by Valentino Braitenburg is a really fun intro to the subject.

https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/vehicles

I'll second this - it's a surprisingly quick read. I read through the first part in a weekend; the later have took me a bit longer.

Some deep essential background on the legacy of Columbia students hacking Drosophilia Melanogaster:

http://www.columbia.edu/cu/alumni/Magazine/Legacies/Morgan/

The winner will be named "lord of the flies".

Understanding and emulating a very simple brain could be the key to understand how intelligence/learning works and this knowledge (algorithms) could be applied to Artificial intelligence.

"Insects certainly display complex and apparently intelligent behavior. They navigate over long distances, find food, avoid predators, communicate, display courtship, care for their young, and so on. The complexity of their behavioral repertoire is comparable to any mammal."

I'm highly interested in the topic but find the content to be unappealing.

The interesting parts of the content are in their "Workshop on Brain Circuits, Memory and Computation" pages:

  - Neural modeling as a way to advance long term studies in artificial intelligence and brain-computer interfaces
  - Pattern recognition neural circuits
  - Decision-making circuits
  - Models of spatio-temporal memory circuits
  - Circuit models for memory access and storage
  - Integration of various computational sensory and control models

"We make a step towards an algorithmic theory of neuronal function, which should facilitate large-scale neural circuit simulations and biologically inspired Artificial Intelligence."

Sounds like OpenWorm.