analog outputs

[Steven J. Nowlan]

With regards to Dave's suggestion that recurrent backprop nets could
possibly provide analog CAM, I am just finishing a TR on an application
in which a recurrent backprop net was trained to develop stable attractors
for a particular set of vectors. The set of vectors corresponded to the set
of solution vectors for different instances of the n queens problem, and the
network may be treated as performing a constraint satisfaction search from
some initial point, or as recovering a stored memory from a very noisy input.
Although the sets of vectors stored in this application were binary (desired
states 0.1 or 0.9), in principal the method can be used to store analog
vectors, the major limitation is probably a constraint on the minimum
euclidean distance between the stored vectors, to ensure the attraction basins
for each remain distinct. 

		- Steve