Modeling growth and dynamics of neural networks via message passing in Erlang: neural models have a natural home in message passing functional programming languages

Erlang is well suited as a platform for modeling neural dynamics and development. We overview similarities between neural architecture and language paradigms in Erlang, specifically functional programming, message passing, distributed computing and concurrency. We present examples of using Erlang to model neural dynamics and development respectively. Finally, we synthesize these two examples into an artificial retina and then we conclude with an overview of ongoing work.