Investigation of Neural Network Dynamics

Abstract : The purpose of this document is to report the progress made in the first year of the grant entitled Investigation of Neural Network Dynamics. The proposed period of the work was September 1, 1987 to August 31, 1990, The proposed three year budget was $126,200 with a first year budget of $40,000. The grant was closed after a single year because the principal investigator moved from the Applied Physics Laboratory, California Institute of Technology. Nevertheless, many of the initial objectives were met in the single year that the grant was in force. The major result of this investigation is a systematic approach for exploiting the dynamics of a general class of neurodynamical systems for the purpose of neural computation. We have interpreted the back- propagation formalism as an adaptive algorithm for a general class of dynamical systems. The completely continuous formalism lends itself to implementation in analog VLSI. This can be accomplished without external synchronization.