Keywords: PatRec

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### Applications

The principal application of the Hopfield network has been by physicists to the theory of spin glasses. There have been uses of the network for associative or content-addressable memory, in spite of its inefficiency. The architecture has also been the inspiration for networks which minimise functions other than the energy function introduced by Hopfield.

An application of Hopfield networks to the problem of recognizing handwritten digits is described in [3], as part of a comparison of the performance of a number of network architectures on this problem.