Self-Organization and Associative Memory e-bog

Two significant things have happened since the writing of the first edition in 1983. One of them is recent arousal of strong interest in general aspects of "e;neural computing"e;, or "e;neural networks"e;, as the previous neural models are nowadays called. The incentive, of course, has been to develop new com- puters. Especially it may have been felt that the so-called fifth-generation computers, based on conventional logic programming, do not yet contain in- formation processing principles of the same type as those encountered in the brain. All new ideas for the "e;neural computers"e; are, of course, welcome. On the other hand, it is not very easy to see what kind of restrictions there exist to their implementation. In order to approach this problem systematically, cer- tain lines of thought, disciplines, and criteria should be followed. It is the pur- pose of the added Chapter 9 to reflect upon such problems from a general point of view. Another important thing is a boom of new hardware technologies for dis- tributed associative memories, especially high-density semiconductor circuits, and optical materials and components. The era is very close when the parallel processors can be made all-optical. Several working associative memory archi- tectures, based solely on optical technologies, have been constructed in recent years. For this reason it was felt necessary to include a separate chapter (Chap. 10) which deals with the optical associative memories. Part of its con- tents is taken over from the first edition.