drop-outs

1. n. 1. A variety of power glitch (see glitch ); momentary 0 voltage on the
electrical mains.

2. Missing characters in typed input due to software malfunction or system
saturation (one cause of such behavior under Unix when a bad connection to
a modem swamps the processor with spurious character interrupts; see
screaming tty ).

3. Mental glitches; used as a way of describing those occasions when the
mind just seems to shut down for a couple of beats. See glitch , fried.
A really serious case of drop-outs. (The next cartoon in the Crunchly saga
is 73-05-21. The previous one is 73-05-19.

4. Processing units de-activated at random during the training of an
artificial neural network system in order to increase the robustness of
learned representations.