QUANTUM MECHANICS AND PATTERN RECOGNITION

Abstract

It has long been known that the Schrodinger equation provides a description of a certain kind of statistical Markov process. We show here that as a consequence, one can view quantum mechanics as an extension of the Helmholtz machine approach to pattern recognition. Not only does this observation throw new light on the relationship between quantum mechanics and computing theory, but it suggests that mathematical techniques developed for inverse scattering problems might provide an alternative to conventional pattern recognition algorithms.