  An arrangement based on a degenerate cavity laser for forming an array of
non-linearly coupled lasers with an intra-cavity saturable absorber is
presented. More than $30$ lasers were spatially phase locked and temporally
Q-switched. The arrangement with nonlinear coupling was found to be $25$ times
more sensitive to loss differences and converged $5$ times faster to the lowest
loss phase locked state than with linear coupling, thus providing a unique
solution to problems that have several near-degenerate solutions.
