Self-classifying MNIST Digits (Paper Explained)

#ai #biology #machinelearning Neural Cellular Automata are models for how living creatures can use local message passing to reach global consensus without a central authority. This paper teaches pixels of an image to communicate with each other and figure out as a group which digit they represent. On the way, the authors have to deal with pesky side-effects that come from applying the Cross-Entropy Loss in combination with a Softmax layer, but ultimately achieve a self-sustaining, stable and continuous alg