Book Review: Sparse Distributed Memory by Pentti Kanerva - April 7, 2021
Channel: Numenta
Date: 2021-04-09

Our research intern Alex Cuozzo discusses the book Sparse Distributed Memory by Pentti Kanerva. He first explores a few concepts related to high dimensional vectors mentioned in the book such as rotational symmetry, distribution of distances etc. He then talks about the key properties of the Sparse Distributed Memory model and how it relates to a biological one. Lastly, he gives his thoughts and explores some follow up work that aims to convert dense factors to sparse distributed activations.

Sources:
➤ “Sparse Distributed Memory” by Pentti Kanerva: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/sparse-distributed-memory
➤ “An Alternative Design for a Sparse Distributed Memory” by Louis Jaeckel:  https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/19920001073
➤ “A Class of Designs for a Sparse Distributed Memory” by Louis Jaeckel: https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/19920002426/downloads/19920002426.pdf
➤ "Comparison between Kanerva's SDM and Hopfield-type neural networks" by James Keeler: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/0364021388900262
➤ "Notes on implementation of sparsely distributed memory" by James Keeler et al: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Notes-on-implementation-of-sparsely-distributed-Keeler-Denning/a818801315dbeaf892197c5f08c8c8779871fd82
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