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Neural Information Processing Systems 

First provide a summary of the paper, and then address the following criteria: Quality, clarity, originality and significance. As a major novelty, the authors propose that the stochasticity of synaptic transmission is directly involved in the implementation of stochasticity necessary for Monte Carlo sampling. The neurons used throughout the paper are binary threshold units and not spiking neurons. These binary neurons are able to provide useful insights into how a neuronal network may solve computational problems, but it is important to distinguish between implementations using binary units and spiking neurons. The authors include a short section about spike-based implementation in the appendix, but they do not demonstrate that the spike based implementation is able to perform the same tasks with similar performance.