What Does Boltzmann Machine Mean?

A Boltzmann machine is a type of recurrent neural network in which nodes make binary decisions with some bias. Boltzmann machines can be strung together to make more sophisticated systems such as deep belief networks.

Techopedia Explains Boltzmann Machine

Although the Boltzmann machine is named after the Austrian scientist Ludwig Boltzmann who came up with the Boltzmann distribution in the 20th century, this type of network was actually developed by Stanford scientist Geoff Hinton. It is closely related to the idea of a Hopfield network developed in the 1970s, and relies on ideas from the world of thermodynamics to conduct work toward desired states. In fact, some experts might talk about certain types of Boltzmann machine as a “stochastic Hopfield network with hidden units.”