Information Processing Using a Model of Associative Memory

Abstract

Association mechanisms are consid ered to play important roles in thinking in the human brain. Such mechanisms should be analysed and utilized in machine intelligence in order to further work in the field. This paper describes a model of a neural network named 'Associatron', and considers its applications for information processing. The Associatron sto re s a lot of entities in the same region of i ts structure, and recalls the whole of any entity from a part of it without any sequential search. From its structu re, some properties are derived that are expected to be useful for humanlike information processing. Analysis of these properties is b riefly described. An As~oci atr on with 180 neurons has been simulated by a compute r and has been applied to simple examples of concept formation and game playing. Hardware realization of an Associatron with 25 neurons made f o r trial purposes, is outlined, too.