k-winners-take-all neural net with /spl Theta/(1) time complexity

In this article we present a k-winners-take-all (k-WTA) neural net that is established based on the concept of the constant time sorting machine by Hsu and Wang. It fits some specific applications, such as real-time processing, since its /spl Theta/(1) time complexity is independent to the problem size. The proposed k-WTA neural net produces the solution in constant time while the Hopfield network requires a relatively long transient to converge to the solution from some initial states.