[manux]

I think the inspiration came to me from looking at SumTrees and from having worked on Temporal Difference learning for a long time. The idea of flows came to Yoshua and I from the realization that we wanted some kind of energy conservation/preservation mechanism from having multiple paths lead to the same state.

But, yes in the moment it felt like some very serendipitous insight!

[cs702]

Thank you. It's nice to hear that you had one of those shower/bathtub Eureka moments!

> ...we wanted some kind of energy conservation/preservation mechanism from having multiple paths lead to the same state

Makes sense. FWIW, to me this looks like a Conservation Law -- as in Physics. I mean, it's not that the flows "must be" conserved, but that they are conserved (or go into sinks). Any physicists interested in AI should be all over this; it's right up their alley.