Plot twist - these are portholes on a cruise ship and the progress is the last thing you want!

The pandemic experience has been very illuminating.

Open, democratic societies have trouble getting everyone on the same page, there's a lot of contention and disagreement, BUT they have fairly transparent numbers, and as much turbulence as there is they figure it out, although with a higher mortality rate. Also, the very existence and production of the MRNA vaccines, clonal antibodies, etc... is thanks to Western style universities/pharma research/innovation focused economies.

In less open countries, they do a great job at containment, but as we're seeing here, they get stuck without solutions that can extricate them from the issue, especially when they refuse Western vaccines.

Both systems have strong and weak points, but I'm happy that I have the good fortune to live in a mostly open and democratic society when it all shakes out.

Ok so the randomness lets the brain/AI have a better sense of normal distribution, that makes sense.

And in this case sleep almost helps lump things into the different sigmas so it's easy to make decisions without getting lost in datapoints.

Interesting, how does random noise help ML not become too narrow-focused? I'm trying to think of examples, like how they'll kick the Boston Dynamics robots to test their reactions in unstable environments, but that's not quite right.

This certainly makes sense for why sleep is such a universal and critical trait. Without it you essentially run out of "RAM" and forget stuff that you need to survive. Sleep helps put that RAM into long term memory without overwriting the important stuff.

*I know the computer analogy has major issues I'm just trying to parse what the study said in the best framework I understand.