Another week and still no hint of eyewire games?
Sorry everyone. Things have been in flux a bit recently, and maybe we haven’t communicated what’s going on well as we could have. The first hitch in the plan to run a competition was the realization that we may not be able to get the data that we need by reconstructing whole cells. If we can do 1 cell a week with eyewire, that would be almost a year before we can get all 50ish inputs to the J-Cell that we are working on. That’s too long for us, and we’re guessing it would be a long haul for the community as well. So instead we decided to start from the synapses on the J and reconstruct those branches long enough to see what type of cell it is, which direction the branch goes in, and where on the branch the synapse is.
The second issue is that the starburst amacrine cells (SACs) which synapse on the J cell are just really really hard to reconstruct. While the reconstruction of the J cell was very smooth, and we made continuous progress, progress on the inputs have been patchy and pretty slow. The past couple of weeks while we’ve been delaying the competition, we’ve been focusing on ways of helping our players improve. We’ve got a few more tutorial tasks from SACs which demonstrate some of the examples in which we highlight some of the more difficult parts. Hopefully this will help players identify some of the more obscure spots where the branches actually continue, and we’ll be better able to reconstruct these cells.
Since the devs got a little extra time, before the games start, we decided to go ahead and make some performance tweaks. We’re hoping that we’ll be able to handle the traffic spike at the start of the games much better than we did when we first launched.
So again, sorry for the delay. We should announce a finalized date soon.