Searching real-valued synaptic weights of Hopfield's associative memory using evolutionary programming

Abstract

We apply evolutionary computations to Hopfield model of associative memory. Although there have been a lot of researches which apply evolutionary techniques to layered neural networks, their applications to Hopfield neural networks remain few so far. Previously we reported that a genetic algorithm using discrete encoding chromosomes evolves the Hebb-rule associative memory to enhance its storage capacity. We also reported that the genetic algorithm evolves a network with random synaptic weights eventually to store some number of patterns as fixed points. In this paper we present an evolution of the Hopfield model of associative memory using evolutionary programming as a real-valued parameter optimization.