alt Hacker NewsI had fun reading this. Thanks for sharing.
With dendritic compartments, this seems like a waste of a perfectly good neuron that we could productively use elsewhere. ;)
Note that a SINGLE neuron can compute nonlinear functions like XOR.
Shameless plug: If anyone is interested, I did a post a while back on how neurons can act as logic gates:
https://blog.typeobject.com/posts/2025-neural-logic-gates/
This article builds on the first and creates a half adder out of neurons:
Research question: does it make sense to make a new family of logic gates using neurons? My intuition says there is a rich texture/fabric to uncover here. The best analogy on hand right now is legos: rather than 2-knotch legos [standard gates like NAND, XOR] what about some sort of new, irreducible gates that are bigger "legos"? Been a while since I played with logic gates but my intuition says there is something lurking below the surface. A new class of irreducible gates, maybe cross-connections? Like compacted multilayer gates? Think SHA-512, how certain bits feed into different layers of the "puzzle". Optimistic this thought-amalgam serves you in your continued research :)