Sounds as if the guy is suffering from Hemingway Syndrome: computers may see their silicon lives flash before their eyes, so to speak, just before they die, Prodigy Services Co suggests, reporting that physicist Stephen Thaler of McDonnell Douglas Corp has been playing with neural networks as a way to speed diamond crystal growth but while by day, he created and trained the neural nets, by night, he began annihilating them to see what would happen, randomly severing links, and when between 10% and 60% of the links were destroyed, the network regurgitated nonsense, but as it approached death, 90% of the connections severed, it generated distinct values that had been trained into it, and at times even output whimsical states, where it would generate values that were neither trained nor ones that would appear in a healthy net, says Thaler, who thinks it may say something about near-death experiences for humans – It may not just be fancy biochemistry, he suggests.
