Amari's 1972 associative-memory model has priority over the Hopfield network in substance — and Hopfield's 1982 paper does not cite it

Amari's 1972 IEEE work proposed an adaptive, Hebbian-learning recurrent associative-memory network — the Lenz-Ising-derived architecture that Hopfield's 1982 PNAS paper later made famous, a decade earlier. Checked directly: Hopfield's 1982 reference list does not cite Amari 1972 (it cites two later Amari papers, 1977/1978), and Amari himself, in a 2025 interview, confirms exactly this distinction. So Amari has substantive priority over the architecture now called the Hopfield network.

The claim is held with a boundary. The strongest circulating wording — "mathematically equivalent" / "exactly the same" — could not be verified from a primary reading (candidate sources: Amari's 2013 retrospective, a textbook chapter) and stays flagged [unverified-mechanism] in the capture; the load-bearing version here is the weaker, verified one: independent prior proposal, uncited by Hopfield. This is a second Amari priority thread distinct from the contested myth-amari-first-sgd-mlp (that one is single-witness and citogenesis-tainted; this one rests on Hopfield's own reference list, read directly — a stronger footing). Note the pattern recurring across the whole cluster: priority in substance, no citation in the paper that made it famous — Linnainmaa, Werbos, Parker, now Amari. See moc-backpropagation-origins, claim-reverse-mode-multiple-independent-discovery.