Is it really so surprising that something like this works given how human brain neurons work? My admittedly basic understanding is that these operate through an all-or-nothing principle for their action potentials (firing): they either fire or they don't, based on whether the input signals reach a certain threshold. So the output is already sort of binary in biological neurons. The inputs are more like continuous values, since they are the sum of many different neurons sending signals into each neuron, but in this paper the activations are 8-bit, not binary/ternary. Can any neuroscientists here comment?