Memory in biological beings is as complex as the rational complexity of that concrete being requires. Clearly, memory helps to conform knowledge bases to serve the needs of the specific natural being. To analogize from Robotics concepts, it seems that the degrees of freedom in the biological being’s memory are higher or lower depending upon the rationality of each living being. Robots and artificial systems appear to require analogous structures. That is, to build a reactive system, the requirement of memory is not highly demanding with respect to the degrees of freedom. However, the required degrees of freedom seems to grow as the ability of the artificial system to deliberate increases.

Consequently, to design artificial systems that would implement cognitive abilities, it is required to rethink memory structures. When designing a Cognitive Artificial System, memory systems should be thought of as highly accessible discrete units. In addition, these systems would require designs in the form of distributed architectures with non-linear features, such as those of human thought. In addition, they should allow for complex mixed types of data (text, images, time or so).

Blockchain has attracted great interest for a few years now, especially since the appearance of Bitcoin. A blockchain is a distributed ledger that combines an append-only data structure designed to be resistant to modifications, with a consensus protocol [45, 46]. This innovation can be thought of as a sequence of containers, the blocks, that store two things: the information of a “system” and the “service” that such system provides [46], and it provides an interesting starting point to rethink memory systems in robots.

Read the full paper, here.

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