Hopfield Nets and Quantum Mechanics
摘要
Previously, we viewed Hopfield nets from the point of view of statistical mechanics. In this chapter, we widen our perspective one again and view them from the point of view of quantum mechanics. This requires us to introduce completely different representations of the states and energy functions of Hopfield nets and relate them to the kind of tensor product spaces we studied earlier. At this point, this different perspective on Hopfield nets is of purely theoretical interest because it generally defies practical implementations on digital computers. However, it establishes a connection between Hopfield nets and important quantum mechanical concepts. In particular, we will get to know the notion of the Hamiltonian of a physical system, its eigenstates, and eigenvalues. Since the material in this chapter is more abstract and less intuitive than in previous chapters, we develop our ideas by looking at an exemplary simple Hopfield net and support our technical claims through practical computations and code examples.