Applications

Ackley et al. [4] applied the Boltzmann machine to the Encoder Problem, which involves an attempt to create an efficient description of the input vectors by encoding them in the states of the hidden units. It also can be applied to the study of the dynamics of spin glasses.

The Boltzmann machine was among the architectures applied to the recognition of handwritten digits in [3].

An application of the Boltzmann machine to job-shop scheduling is presented in [5] and [6].

The principal limitation the Boltzmann machine is the length of time it takes to produce its results, both in training the weights and in recall. In addition, in spite of the use of simulated annealing, it can get stuck in local minima and fail to find the global minimum.