Sparse distributed memory (SDM) is a mathematical model of human long-term memory introduced by Pentti Kanerva in 1988 while he was at NASA Ames Research Center. It is a generalized random-access memory (RAM) for long (e.g., 1,000 bit) binary words. These words serve as both addresses to and data for the memory. The main attribute of the memory is sensitivity to similarity, meaning that a word can be read back not only by giving the original write address but also by giving one close to it, as measured by the number of mismatched bits (i.e., the Hamming distance between memory addresses).