[yobibyte]

Thanks for such an extended reply!

It's probably hard to estimate an impact of reading outside of your field, but this definitely sounds like a good idea. A positive bonus here is that you get more exposure to how people write and talk about research in different areas, and I find it super useful. I've recently read about Curry-Howard correspondence (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curry%E2%80%93Howard_correspon...), and it was mind-blowing both in terms of what they talk about and how they talk about it.

On the negative side, it's often quite hard to understand only because the terminology is different.

Re Neural Turing Machines, there's been an interesting resurgence of the field working on algorithmic tasks (check out this amazing survey https://arxiv.org/abs/2102.09544).