Simulation of associative neural networks

Abstract

The human brain is far superior to a modern computer in its ability to do associative recall. Many theorists believe that one of the important functions of primate neocortex is "associative memory". Palm's network (Palm et al., 1997) is one of the most powerful associative memory models available. To study variations of this basic model, we have built a multiprocessor based Palm simulator that executes on our Beowulf cluster and supercomputers at NASA. We have also created a spiking version that adds temporal information to the model and is more biologically plausible. Experimental results are summarized, and the problems solved are also discussed.