Optical implementation in Boltzmann machines
Anthony J. Ticknor, Harrison H. Barrett · Annual Meeting Optical Society of America · 1986
The Boltzmann machine, a hardware implementation of the simulated annealing algorithm, easily and directly takes advantage of highly interconnected systems for parallel processing. Optical systems for matrix operations and random number generation greatly relax the computational burden of the digital electronics and increase the speed by many orders of magnitude over the software implementation. The algorithm is inherently fault-tolerant, but simple use of an analog optical system for matrix operations might critically limit available dynamic range and space-bandwidth product. We therefore present a method for significantly increasing the available dynamic range with little sacrifice in the overall grain-processing speed. We also show how under some circumstances the usable space-bandwidth product of the reconstruction can be increased.