COMAX: A Cooperative Method for Determining the Position of the Maxima

摘要

In this paper, a novel method for the determination of the position of the maxima among the M members of a set of positive real numbers S that stem from a finite discrete domain is proposed. The method does not follow the competitive spirit of the winner-take-all methods. It involves neither recursion nor comparisons between the members of S. Instead, a threshold T less than but arbitrarily close to the maximum value of S is directly calculated, with the contribution of all members of S and then each member of S is compared with it. Also, it is shown how the proposed method can be applied to the associative memory problem. In addition, arguments are given showing that, in principle, there are versions of the proposed method that are significantly faster than other well established methods for determining the position of the maximum in a set S of numbers.