This paper presents an accurate current mode synchronous Loser-Take-All circuit based on a simple regenerative pair. The regenerative pair and the related resetting transistors lead to a circuit requiring only four transistors, seven for deep binary tree structures. It achieves its high speed through regenerative feedback. The basic circuit requires no current mirrors and has only parasitic los...

The neocortex has a remarkably uniform neuronal organization, suggesting that common principles of processing are employed throughout its extent. In particular, the patterns of connectivity observed in the superficial layers of the visual cortex are consistent with the recurrent excitation and inhibitory feedback required for cooperative-competitive circuits such as the soft winner-take-all (WT...

We study winner-take-all contests for crowdsourcing procurement in a model of costly effort and stochastic production. The principal announces a prize value P , agents simultaneously select a level of costly effort to exert towards production, yielding stochastic quality results, and then the agent who produces the highest quality good is paid P by the principal. We derive conditions on the pro...

In agro-ecosystems worldwide, some of the most important and devastating diseases are caused by soil-borne necrotrophic fungal pathogens, against which crop plants generally lack genetic resistance. However, plants have evolved approaches to protect themselves against pathogens by stimulating and supporting specific groups of beneficial microorganisms that have the ability to protect either by ...

A novel neural-based solution to the problem of dynamic load balancing in homogeneous distributed systems is proposed. The winner-Take-All (WTA) neural network model is used for implementing the selection and location policies of a typical dynamic load balancing algorithm. Unlike most of the previous literature that assumed independent tasks, which is not always true, tasks with interprocess co...

The computational abilities of recurrent networks of neurons with a linear activation function above threshold are analyzed. These networks selectively realise a linear mapping of their input. Using this property, the dynamics as well as the number and the stability of stationary states can be investigated. The important property of the boundedness of neural activities can be guaranteed by glob...

Everybody “knows” that neural networks need more than a single layer of nonlinear units to compute interesting functions. We show that this is false if one employs winner-take-all as nonlinear unit: Any boolean function can be computed by a single -winner-takeall unit applied to weighted sums of the input variables. Any continuous function can be approximated arbitrarily well by a single soft w...

This paper describes a spike-based model of binaural sound localization using interaural time differences (ITDs). To handle the problem of temporal coding and to facilitate a hardware implementation all neurons are simulated by a spike response model, which includes postsynaptic potentials (PSPs) and a refractory period. A winner-take-all (WTA) network selects the dominant source from the repre...

We have designed, fabricated, and tested a series of compact CMOS integrated circuits that realize the winner-take-all function. These analog, continuous-time circuits use only O(n) of interconnect to perform this function. We have also modified the winner-take-all circuit, realizing a circuit that computes local nonlinear inhibition. Two general types of inhibition mediate activity in neural s...