A cool thing that propagator networks can do: if you unconnect the data source, it just stops updating.

It's like an escalator: if it's unconnected, it just becomes stairs.

This is kind of nice in some cases.

Imagine a graph of lots of different nodes all connected.

For example, maybe a node that summarizes your searches in a system and feeds it to another synthesized ranker.

This could live update as you do more searches… but that's a bit scary.

What if you do a bunch of searches for hemorrhoid cream, such that now downstream things also update with that recommendation.

Maybe those recommendations might be shown to other users. Embarrassing!

Spooky action at a distance.

The fear of that happening would chill experimentation.

But imagine if instead of it being live-updating, it only updated when you connected the network temporarily to your data.

You dip the network into your private data; it absorbs all the interesting intuition, and then you remove it to let it dry.

You can dip it again if you want, but if you don't, it won't change.

You don't have to worry about spooky action at a difference.