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 memory systems with binary threshold nodes. They are guaranteed to converge to a local minimum, but convergence to a false pattern (wrong local minimum) rather than the stored pattern (expected local minimum) can occur. Hopfield networks also provide a model for understanding human memory.