@lain another fuckin weird thing is that I/O is apparently done by just repeatedly flagging spike trains.

people tested this theory (digital vision systems, a funny camera) and its weirdly effective in that the camera's reconstituted footage was immune to motion blur and other things. they also tested recognizing visual events that way, where the network is not fed an image but only pulses that indicate if a pixel went up or down in intensity. audio was also tested this way, where audio is broken in band passes and then they send tuples of which band going up or down.

part of the brain's low energy use is based around this. the DVS systems actually reached about 2x the biological power draw--contrast to sending full sync-locked frames.

so we have them doing competitively, we just have not had anyone publicly make them self-train in a sandbox.

i think we are actually eerily close to building sophonts but i am somewhat alone in this belief. most of the people trying are doing stupid shit like just buying more computers and talking about pflops or nuclear reactors to power GPUs. they're not actually looking at it as an algorithmic problem that can literally just be solved with just a little bit of evolutionary coding and a gamer box lmao