Compares two states and selects a winner or identifies their relationship.
What It Does
Boolean.Comparison neurons activate on comparative constructions that evaluate two items against each other and produce a binary verdict: which is larger, faster, older, more correct. They fire on 'X is better than Y', 'A exceeds B', 'neither X nor Y satisfies the condition.' They are the Boolean neurons most closely linked to reasoning and argument evaluation.
How It Behaves
Despite being among the smallest neuron sub-groups in our corpus, Comparison neurons show a distinctive bimodal layer distribution — they activate in both early layers (parsing the comparative structure) and late layers (committing to which side of the comparison wins). This makes them computationally distinctive: they are doing active work at both ends of the processing pipeline.
Research Example
In Qwen3 1.7B, Boolean.Comparison neurons are active during counterfactual reasoning — 'If Einstein had been born in 1980 instead of 1879, would he have worked on quantum computing?' The comparison between the actual and hypothetical world activates these neurons before the model constructs its response.