Neurons, and our Model of Them.
- While knowledge of the functioning of neurons is incomplete, there
is extensive knowledge about them.
- This knowledge includes:
- neurons collect activation
- neurons spike and loose activation
- retained activation decays if the neuron doesn't fire
- neurons are either excitatory or inhibitory but not both
- there is a range of neural topologies, but neurons are
not well connected
- neurons fatigue
- There are many sophsticated models of neurons.
- Our model is simpler than most, involving all of the above.
- However, we have discrete activation cycles (not biologically plausible)
that we map to 10ms of real time.
- This allows us to hide a lot of detail and make the simulation
efficient.
- We simulate a small number (currently under 100,000) neurons in real time.
