Deterministic, Stochastic and Mean-field Annealing of Hopfield Models

  1. What is a local minima problem in optimization ?
  2. How is mean-field annealing applied in the solution of optimization problems?
  3. Discuss the solution to the Traveling salesman problem using deterministic relaxation and stochastic relaxation.

Hint: Refer [Yegnanarayana, 1999, pg. 299] and [Wilson and Pawley, 1988]