Kanerva's Sparse Distributed Memory: an Associative Memory Algorithm Well-Suited to the Connection Machine

The advent of the Connection Machine profoundly changes the world of supercomputers. Its highly nontraditional architecture makes possible the exploration of algorithms that were impractical for standard Von Neumann architectures. Kanerva’s sparse distributed memory (SDM) is an example of such an algorithm. Sparse distributed memory is a particularly simple and elegant formulation for an associative memory. In this paper I describe the foundations for sparse distributed memory, and give some simple examples of using the memory. I continue by showing the relationship of sparse distributed memory to random-access memory. Finally, I discuss the implementation of the algorithm for sparse distributed memory on the Connection Machine.