The Hopfield Model

Abstract

One of the milestones for the current renaissance in the field of neural networks was the associative model proposed by Hopfield at the beginning of the 1980s. Hopfield’s approach illustrates the way theoretical physicists like to think about ensembles of computing units. No synchronization is required, each unit behaving as a kind of elementary system in complex interaction with the rest of the ensemble. An energy function must be introduced to harness the theoretical complexities posed by such an approach. The next two sections deal with the structure of Hopfield networks. We then proceed to show that the model converges to a stable state and that two kinds of learning rules can be used to find appropriate network weights.