Associative memory

Storage that is addressed by content rather than by location — you ask with part of the thing, not with where it lives.

Like you're twelve

You do not remember your friend's face by looking up slot 4,182 in your head. You catch a bit of their laugh across a room and the whole person arrives — the name, the last conversation, the fact that they hate coriander. A fragment brought back the whole, and nobody told you where it was filed.

Precisely

In an ordinary store you supply an address and get back whatever is there. In an associative memory you supply a pattern — possibly partial, possibly corrupted — and get back the stored pattern it belongs to. There is no address to know and no index to keep in step, because content and location are the same thing.

Reading is a settling process rather than a fetch: the input is drawn toward the nearest attractor and the result comes back with a fidelity score. This is also, exactly, a Cleanup memory, which is why an associative store is the natural home for symbolic vector algebra.

Related

Hopfield network · Elastic Associative Memory (EAM) · Attractor · Cleanup memory