A Hopfield network is a form of recurrent artificial neural network popularized by John Hopfield in 1982, but described earlier by Little in 1974.
Hopfield nets serve as content-addressable (“associative”) memory systems with binary threshold nodes. They are guaranteed to converge to a local minimum, but will sometimes converge to a false pattern (a wrong local minimum) rather than the stored pattern (anexpected local minimum).
Hopfield networks also provide a model for understanding human memory.