Holography, Associative Memory, and Inductive Generalization
Psychology Press eBooks · 2014
The logical structure of a local memory, such as a conventional computer store, is straightforward. Each piece of information is stored in a separate location and can be retrieved with perfect accuracy, and the quantity of information that can be stored is simply given by the number of available locations. The design of a distributed memory presents problems. By definition each memory location is to store a number of pattern pairs, all intermingled, and each pattern pair is distributed over more than one memory location. Thus the retrieval process involves more than just the reading out from a sequence of memory locations. One may ask, "How should information be stored in a distributed memory so that it can be retrieved accurately? Are some methods of distributed storage and retrieval better than others? How efficient is the holographic method?"