A reader responds to the news that spiky neural networks perform better if periodically fed noise, thought to be the equivalent of sleep:
I think the researchers are on to something there. We know that we have perceptual flaws, especially visual. But we also know that it works nearly perfectly most of the time, filling in the missing gaps of the blind spot, etc. in near real time. Sleep may be just the thing that allows our systems to continue working at near optimum.
It’s not entirely clear how, at least to me, although I speculate that it fuzzes out the need for precision which would otherwise become too demanding for real world interactions.
But what do I know? I’ve never worked with a neuromorphic processor, and probably never will.
