empty_string_ t1_iw04y1c wrote
Reply to comment by epelle9 in Scientists Taught an AI to ‘Sleep’ So That It Doesn't Forget What It Learned, Like a Person. Researchers say counting sleep may be the best way for AIs to exhibit life-long learning. by mossadnik
Saving one dataset to another and then wiping the active set is common computer function. You can definitely make a comparison to how this is similar to humans and sleeping.
The part that bugs me is saying they "Taught" the AI to "sleep" , as if it now has some independent concept of resting and clearing it's mind to be refreshed. It sounds more like they "programmed" the AI to "save data".
epelle9 t1_iw063m3 wrote
Well, I think you are looking at both humans sleep and transfer of data too much on the surface level.
"Resting and feeling refreshed" come mostly from your brain processing data, and storing it in a different format for long term storage.
That's why you can be under anesthesia for 8 hours and not wake up feeling rested and refreshed as if you would've slept and processed those memories. REM sleep is basically the equivalent of processing human RAM for long term storage.
Also, saving one data set to another is likely not what's going on in the AI, I would bet that it processing the data set, and storing it on a different data structure that allows better long term storage and different compression. Clearing the short term memory.
Sleep science is still a pretty undeveloped field, but I wouldn't be surprised if both processes are very similar. I'm willing to bet that the research on both field will complement each other very nicely.
I get your point though, we still don't even know enough about sleep to program a computer to do it like us, but this is definitely linked to sleep.
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