Sparse Distributed Memory. 1989. From American Scientist, July-August 1989. Sparse Distributed Memory is a model invented by Pentti Kanerva for human long term memory. The model, which can be formulated either as a neural network or an associative memory architecture, associates patterns (long bit vectors) with other patterns. It can remember sequences and associations, extract signals from noise, and generate abstractions of related cases. And it can forget.
Is Thinking Computable? 1990. From American Scientist, March-April 1990. Strong AI meets a strong challenge from the Chinese Room of Searle and quantum physics of Penrose. Although it intrigues us that we might have agodlike power to create beings more advanced than ourselves, we are also threatened by that possibility, and we have learned to maneuver around it.
Modeling Reality. 1990. From American Scientist, November-December 1990. A perspective on strengths and weaknesses of computer models for complex situations involving humans, expressing a good deal of skepticism about the reliability and accuracy of such models.
Queueing networks. 1991. From American Scientist, May & September 1991. Queueing networks are a simple, powerful, and effective model for congestion, bottlenecks, response time, and throughput of many computing systems and networks.
Passwords. 1992. From American Scientist, March-April 1992. Reusable passwords are gradually giving way to one-time passwords implemented with smart cards.
The Internet After 30 Years. 1997. From Internet Besieged, Addison-Wesley, 1997. An update of an article from American Scientist written in 1989, recording the perceptions in 1989 about the formation and future of the Internet.