# Kanerva, Pentti (1988). Sparse Distributed Memory **URL:** \ **Category:** Numenta Theory\ **Created:** [December 7, 2018, 10:25pm UTC](https://discourse.numenta.org/t/kanerva-pentti-1988-sparse-distributed-memory/5039 "2018-12-07T22:25:10Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **Showing post:** 3

**Author:** ![Bitking](https://yyz2.discourse-cdn.com/flex030/user_avatar/discourse.numenta.org/bitking/32/3099_2.png) [@Bitking](https://discourse.numenta.org/u/Bitking)\ **Post date:** [December 7, 2018, 11:17pm UTC](https://discourse.numenta.org/t/kanerva-pentti-1988-sparse-distributed-memory/5039/3 "2018-12-07T23:17:56Z")

I did a search for “Kanerva” on this forum and could not confirm that. Numenta is certainly aware of the work but I can’t see that Kanerva ever worked for Jeff. The most relevant hits are here: > [@Further reading on SDRs and Temporal Memory](https://discourse.numenta.org/t/further-reading-on-sdrs-and-temporal-memory/2034): > > I came across a book from Pentti Kanerva titled Sparse Distributed Memory. It arrived today and upon looking through it I became surprised that I’d not heard of Kanerva’s work before. As the cortex is a sparse distributed memory system, and is the bases of HTM theory, Kanerva’s book goes into great detail of the subject of SDM (or ‘SDR’) so is a great read for extending the understanding and appreciation for how the cortex communicates in this simple but brilliant semantic language. Beyond tha… > [@Deep learning meets sparse distributed representations: The Kanerva Machine](https://discourse.numenta.org/t/deep-learning-meets-sparse-distributed-representations-the-kanerva-machine/3743): > > “We present an end-to-end trained memory system that quickly adapts to new data and generates samples like them. Inspired by Kanerva’s sparse distributed memory, it has a robust distributed reading and writing mechanism. The memory is analytically tractable, which enables optimal on-line compression via a Bayesian update-rule. We formulate it as a hierarchical conditional generative model, where memory provides a rich data-dependent prior distribution. Consequently, the top-down memory and botto… > [@Genetically determined connections](https://discourse.numenta.org/t/genetically-determined-connections/2050/2): > > If you look at the original STDP paper (Bi & Poo 1998) and any paper that measures postsynaptic potentials, it’s pretty clear that synapses can be and often are weighted. They also come in a huge diversity of different sizes, and this has some relationship to the evoked synaptic potential. And this is true for pyramidal neurons too (Bi & Poo was hippocampal pyramids), it’s just that we don’t know whether or to what degree the weight matters, computationally. You get a lot of power even just fro… --- _[View the full topic](https://discourse.numenta.org/t/kanerva-pentti-1988-sparse-distributed-memory/5039)._