What Is a Stationary State in a Potentially Infinite System?
摘要
The seemingly innocuous question of what constitute stationary activity is discussed when the system under study can be very, very large. It is realized that answering the question can be far from trivial. Moreover, these difficulties find their counterparts when one wants to simulate such systems. This leads us to the perfect sampling algorithms that allow us to sample from a finite population of neurons embedded in a very large (potentially infinite) population in finite time. Appendix D goes deeper into perfect sampling.