Autoassociative memory

Back in, oh, the 90's sometime, I had the entire summer off and we were in Budapest. During that time I implemented a Kohonen network in Visual Basic (and invented Gray codes while I was doing it, because I wanted neighboring numbers to differ by only one bit - only much later did I discover they had a name before I was born), and successfully saw it retrieve geometrical shapes given a noisy input.

My ultimate idea was to implement some kind of "cognitive stub" that would be a (long) vector that somehow encoded a "semantic flavor" of a given semantic structure. Put those into an autoassociative memory and you've got something that kind of feels like human memory.

I still think it's a good idea, but there have been a lot of higher-priority things, like getting the kids through school and making sure I can retire before I'm 98. Also, sometime between then and now I seem to have entirely lost that code, which sucks, actually, because I really hate data loss.

But you know, I just ran across a reference to autoassociative memories (a password reminder, odd application but there you go). That author uses a discrete Hopfield network library of his own devising, but I wanted a better overview of the field, like this here.

Maybe I'll dabble with these things soon. Like this winter.