7. What is the purpose of traceTorch?

So, with the positives and negatives in consideration, what even is the purpose of traceTorch? Admittedly, it fills quite the specific niche. Online, biologically plausible learning, bordering on the concept of Single Lifetime Learning (SLL), is hardly something that serves a practical purpose, and is instead designed with the intent of playing around, experimenting, researching. Think of it as a way to make artificial creatures, and then training them in a similar fashion to how real creatures are trained. traceTorch in it’s entirety is designed around this workflow: creating the model, training it, inspecting and assessing it.

It’s not a 1:1 recreation of biological neurons, but that was never the intent. It’s not an in-place replacement of conventional PyTorch models, because it has the biological restrictions applied. It’s a kind of amalgamation of the two, aiming to create biological-esque networks in a computationally feasible manner.

With the introduction out of the way, it’s recommended that you read through some of the tutorials, at the very least Tutorial 0 to become familiar with the terminology used in traceTorch.