Comment by fc417fc802

Perhaps. It's also possible that the approach simply precludes the use of the best tool for the job. Backprop is quite powerful and it just doesn't work in the face of heavy quantization.

Whereas if you're already using evolution strategies or a genetic algorithm or similar then I don't expect changing the bit width (or pretty much anything else) to make any difference to the overall training efficiency (which is presumably already abysmal outside of a few specific domains such as RL applied to a sufficiently ambiguous continuous control problem).