as shown in fig5 the invention utilizes a three layer asynchronous competitive neural network formed from simple logic elements n 1 11 through n 1 87 n 2 1 through n 2 8 and n 3 11 through n 3 87 layer 1 contains 56 neurons the outputs from accumulator 20 0 is shown connected to the eight neurons n 11 to n 17 and the outputs from accumulator 20 7 connected to neurons n 81 to n 87 layer 2 has eight neurons one for each of the eight accumulators while layer 3 has 56 neurons the network shown will solve the problem of identifying the lowest 8 bit value from up to eight error accumulators available as the neural network solution on bus 8 information from the accumulators feeds forward through network 6 while feedback from layer 3 to layer 1 provides reinforcement or inhibition of the input data as appropriate some feed forward of the input data directly to layer 3 also occurs the lowest 16 bit word from among all the accumulators in a particular fuzzy set comparator eventually settles at the layer 2 output when multiple fuzzy set comparator devices are used having more than eight input data patterns a second three layer neural network 7 0 as shown.