Statistical Physics of Spin Glasses and Information Processing: An Introduction (International Series of Monographs on Physics, 111)

Assuming only general knowledge of statistical mechanics and basic probability theory, Nishimori (physics, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan) reviews recent developments in error-correcting codes, image restoration, neural networks, and optimization problems. He provides a unified viewpoint traversing several different research fields with the replica methods as the common language, which emerged from the spin glass theory. The spin glass theory itself is addressed in the first part, followed by statistical-mechanical approaches to information processing problems.

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