Limited synapse overproduction can speed development but sometimes with long-term energy and discrimination penalties
Fig 6
A neuron overproduces and subsequently sheds synapses.
An individual example of the overproduction phenomenon. The neuron develops in a simulation with a γ value of 0.0003 and an ε value of 0.0015 and is representative of the amount of overproduction for neurons with these settings. It obtains a maximum total synapse number of 30 at block 101, but eventually stabilizes with 14 synapses by block 235. The simulation continues for 1,088 more blocks with connections remaining unchanged. Note that the example neuron shown here (Fig 7B) is chosen from the 1,000 neurons used to produce the single data point where γ equals 0.0003.