Binary Cell Assemblies

I'm a cell assembly (CA) guy.
I think they're really important for understanding cognition.
I also think they're going to be really important in making agents in neurons that learn robustly.
CAs represent both long term and short term memory. They're short term memory when they're firing.
A simple version of the CA is a binary CA. Get a set of neurons (say 10).
Connect them so that if they start to fire they continue to fire indefinitely.
If you whack in some inhibitory neurons to keep them firing at a stable rate, it's a pretty robust programming mechanism. The last version we used had 10 neurons per CA, with 2 being inhibitory. They fired every 5ms.
You can connect them up so that two turn on a third, which turns off the first, and FSA.
A binary CA is not a great actual CA as, for instance, they only persist for a few seconds.
The semantic components (e.g. hot and coke) of the associative memory were binary CAs.