The hysteretic Hopfield neural network

Several neuron activation functions have been proposed (e.g., linear, binary, sigmoid) for recurrent and multilayer artificial neural networks. In this paper we present a hysteretic neuron activation function for optimization and learning. We prove Lyapunov stability of a hysteretic Hopfield neural network, and then solve a combinatorial optimization problem (i.e., the N-queen problem) using this network. We demonstrate the advantages of hysteresis by showing increased frequency of convergence to a solution, when the parameters associated with the activation function are varied