I laughed when Paco (the fly) priced a torta at $1.
Every torta in Torta Stand costs $1.75 to make, so this looked like a very bad business decision. I sent Colin a message saying as much. Paco was only working with 128 brain-like cells after all, so I wasn’t expecting much of a business strategy.
But then, Paco changed the special, finished a 14-day run with 29 regulars, and beat me at my own game.
See, the price Paco set worked like a loss leader. I had built the game so that cheaper tortas could bring in more customers and turn some of them into regulars, but I had never tried lowering the price of a torta below what it cost to make. By changing the special and keeping the price low, Paco brought in enough repeat business to make up for the money he lost at the start.
So, yes, naturally, the only reasonable thing to do next was this meme.
All this started when Google Research published the first complete map of an adult male fruit fly's brain and central nervous system. Obviously, devs around the world immediately made the fly play Doom and trade Bitcoin!
At Torta Studios, we just asked ourselves: could an AI built from a fruit fly’s brain make growth decisions? So we trained a small decision layer to turn the fly’s activity into moves the adversary AI could make in Torta Stand. Naturally, we decided to give the fly a name and its own torta truck.
Paco now parks his own torta truck at Trade and Tryon. He has moods and looks pleased when he is ahead and increasingly offended when he is not.
I know Paco can beat me. Now I want to know whether he can beat you.
Reply and tell me who won. We instrumented accepted starts, completed matches, final scores, and rematches, so Paco's reputation will eventually have to survive the data.
— Alan, Colin & the Torta team
P.S. This is what we do at Torta Studios: we take technically unusual stuff and turn it into a competitive advantage that is useful and understandable. A fruit fly running a torta stand is fun. Real businesses have much more interesting problems, and those are the ones we want to solve for you.