I read this fascinating article recently: Researchers Made an AI Whose Performance Increases if They Let It Sleep And Dream
"the team worked out a way to mathematically implement human sleep patterns - rapid-eye movement sleep and slow-wave sleep, the former of which is thought to remove unnecessary memories, and the latter of which is thought to consolidate important ones.
“So this is what the [artificial neural network’s] ‘sleep’ state does too, cycling through and unlearning unnecessary information, and then consolidating what’s left, the important stuff.”
The result was that the neural network had a much higher storage capacity.
You can read the entire (short) article here. I was particularly interested in this because I had just been reading about those mechanisms for REM and NREM sleep in Matthew Walker’s excellent Why We Sleep (reviewed by Andrew Holecek here).
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His theory that improved sleep in early humans as a result of taking up ground sleeping (as opposed to sleeping in trees) may have been central to our big evolutionary leap forward–is fascinating and thought-provoking. (And makes me wonder if the modern “war on sleep” could cause us to _de_volve! Or at least not be at the top of our evolutionary game…)