nucleation

LIT-928: Sparse Distributed Memory

1 min read

Properties3
StatusUnavailable — searched 2026-10-14 for a lawful full text, none reached, so it is not read and no NOTE is filed. The book has no DOI; the MIT Press page and MIT Press Direct returned Cloudflare 403 checks, and no open-access edition was found; the Internet Archive has no scan of the book; NASA's Technical Reports Server holds Kanerva's public-domain RIACS and Stanford reports on SDM, which are different works (LIT-921 is one of them). What the book says about cues beyond the critical distance, which CLAIM-180 leans on, is therefore still unchecked here. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied.
Version3
Tagscognition, neuroscience, information-retrieval

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Pentti Kanerva (1988), Sparse Distributed Memory, MIT Press, Cambridge MA

Key takeaways

Filed, not read. Known here by what it is standardly cited for.

  • Addresses are patterns. A memory is written to, and read from, the hard locations near its own content, so the content is the address.
  • A noisy cue retrieves a stored pattern by iterated reading only if it lies within a critical distance of it. Beyond that, reading does not converge on the pattern.
  • Kanerva maps the model onto the cerebellum.

Standing in the record

Filed on 2026-10-11 at the owner’s request, under ADR-013: the anthology holds the book (ANTH-LIT-666) for attention, and this record holds it for the critical distance as a model of drift (CLAIM-180). The record’s reading of Bricken & Pehlevan (LIT-269, NOTE-242) states SDM and its critical distance and checks the paper’s formulas against Kanerva’s. A reading here should check what the book says about cues beyond the critical distance, which is what the claim leans on.

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