Synaesthesia is an unusual perceptual experience in which an inducer stimulus triggers a percept in a different domain in addition to its own. To explore the conditions under which synaesthesia evolves, we studied a neuronal network model that represents two recurrently connected neural systems. The interactions in the network evolve according to learning rules that optimize sensory sensitivity. We demonstrate several scenarios, such as sensory deprivation or heightened plasticity, under which synaesthesia can evolve even though the inputs to the two systems are statistically independent and the initial cross-talk interactions are zero. Sensory deprivation is the known causal mechanism for acquired synaesthesia and increased plasticity is implicated in developmental synaesthesia. The model unifies different causes of synaesthesia within a single theoretical framework and repositions synaesthesia not as some quirk of aberrant connectivity, but rather as a functional brain state that can emerge as a consequence of optimising sensory information processing.
Traffic splitting is a required functionality in networks, for example for load balancing over multiple paths or among different servers. The capacities of the servers determine the partition by which traffic should be split. A recent approach implements traffic splitting within the ternary content addressable memory (TCAM), which is often available in switches. It is important to reduce the amount of memory allocated for this task since TCAMs are power consuming and are often also required for other tasks such as classification and routing. Previous work showed how to compute the smallest TCAM necessary to implement a given partition exactly. In this paper we solve the more practical case, where at most TCAM rules are available, restricting the ability to implement the desired partition. We give simple and efficient algorithms to find rules that generate a partition closest in ∞ to the desired one. We do the same for a one-sided version of ∞ which equals to the maximum overload on a server and for a relative version of it. We use our algorithms to evaluate how the expected error changes as a function of the number of rules, the number of servers, and the width of the TCAM.
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