Sparse Distributed Memory

Kanerva's approach has been championed by Jeff Hawkins' Numenta and Redwood Neuroscience Institute. Numenta uses the terminology Sparse Distributed Representations (SDR).

While the theoretical basis seems sound, a practical implementation comparable to the SOTA is lacking.

Ha, I wrote most of this article. Also check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holographic_associative_memory but it needs some work

I don't keep around many items from my collection of my mid-90s AI books, but for some reason Kanerva's Sparse Distributed Memory book always managed to make the cut whenever I go in to cull things. There is something about the idea that seems appealing and I keep waiting for some excuse to see if any of the ideas can be melded with more recent approaches to NN memory...