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Dissipation and memory capacity in the quantum brain model

Vitiello, G

Published Feb 6, 1995• 163 citations
OpenAlex

Abstract

The quantum model of the brain proposed by Ricciardi and Umezawa is extended to dissipative dynamics in order to study the problem of memory capacity. It is shown that infinitely many vacua are accessible to memory printing in a way that in sequential information recording the storage of a new information does not destroy the previously stored ones, thus allowing a huge memory capacity. The mechanism of information printing is shown to induce breakdown of time-reversal symmetry. Thermal properties of the memory states as well as their relation with squeezed coherent states are finally discussed.

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The quantum model of the brain proposed by Ricciardi and Umezawa is extended to dissipative dynamics in order to study the problem of memory capacity. It is shown that infinitely many vacua are accessible to memory printing in a way that in sequential information recording the storage of a new information does not destroy the previously stored ones, thus allowing a huge memory capacity. The mechanism of information printing is shown to induce breakdown of time-reversal symmetry. Thermal properties of the memory states as well as their relation with squeezed coherent states are finally discussed.
The quantum model of the brain proposed by Ricciardi and Umezawa is extended to dissipative dynamics in order to study the problem of memory capacity. It is shown that infinitely many vacua are accessible to memory printing in a way that in sequential information recording the storage of a new information does not destroy the previously stored ones, thus allowing a huge memory capacity. The mechanism of information printing is shown to induce breakdown of time-reversal symmetry. Thermal properties of the memory states, as well as their relation with squeezed coherent states, are finally discussed.
This is a short review of some features of brain modeling in quantum field theory. The brain is continuously interacting with its environment and its functional activity has to be therefore described by a dissipative dynamics. In the model, memory states are generated by the mechanism of spontaneous breakdown of symmetry. From the dissipative dynamics several consequences can be derived, such as the description of the environment in terms of the time-reversed copy of the brain, called its Double. Formally this is achieved by the procedure of doubling the degrees of freedom and the resulting state is a two-mode entangled coherent state. The act of consciousness is proposed to reside in the dialog between the brain and its Double, occurring always in the present, the “Now”, where the brain and its Double indeed meet, on the surface of the time-mirror.
Quantum neural networks form one pillar of the emergent field of quantum machine learning. Here quantum generalizations of classical networks realizing associative memories---capable of retrieving patterns, or memories, from corrupted initial states---have been proposed. It is a challenging open problem to analyze quantum associative memories with an extensive number of patterns and to determine the maximal number of patterns the quantum networks can reliably store, i.e., their storage capacity. In this work, we propose and explore a general method for evaluating the maximal storage capacity of quantum neural network models. By generalizing what is known as Gardner's approach in the classical realm, we exploit the theory of classical spin glasses for deriving the optimal storage capacity of quantum networks with quenched pattern variables. As an example, we apply our method to an open-system quantum associative memory formed of interacting spin-1/2 particles realizing coupled artificial neurons. The system undergoes a Markovian time evolution resulting from a dissipative retrieval dynamics that competes with a coherent quantum dynamics. We map out the nonequilibrium phase diagram and study the effect of temperature and Hamiltonian dynamics on the storage capacity. Our method opens an avenue for a systematic characterization of the storage capacity of quantum associative memories.
We implement a mechanism - originally proposed as a model for the large memory storage capacity of black holes - in quantum neural networks and show that an exponentially increased capacity of pattern storage and recognition is achieved in certain critically excited states, without involvement of synaptic plasticity. We consider a simple network of N interconnected quantum neurons with weak excitatory synaptic connections. We show that for frozen synaptic weights there exist the critical states of enhanced memory storage capacity. These states are achieved thanks to the high excitation levels of some of the neurons, which - despite of feeble synaptic connections - dramatically lower the response threshold of the remaining weaker-excited neurons. As a results, the latter neurons acquire a capacity to store an exponentially large number of patterns within a narrow energy gap. The stored patterns can be recognized and retrieved with perfect response under the influence of arbitrarily soft input stimuli. In sharp contrast, under the same stimuli the recall is absent in the ground-state of the system. The lesson is that the state with the highest micro-state entropy and memory storage capacity is not necessarily a local minimum of energy, but rather an excited critical state. The considered phenomenon has a smooth classical limit and can serve for achieving an enhanced memory storage capacity in classical brain networks.
We review our models of quantum associative memories that represent the “quantization” of fully coupled neural networks like the Hopfield model. The idea is to replace the classical irreversible attractor dynamics driven by an Ising model with pattern-dependent weights by the reversible rotation of an input quantum state onto an output quantum state consisting of a linear superposition with probability amplitudes peaked on the stored pattern closest to the input in Hamming distance, resulting in a high probability of measuring a memory pattern very similar to the input. The unitary operator implementing this transformation can be formulated as a sequence of one-qubit and two-qubit elementary quantum gates and is thus the exponential of an ordered quantum Ising model with sequential operations and with pattern-dependent interactions, exactly as in the classical case. Probabilistic quantum memories, that make use of postselection of the measurement result of control qubits, overcome the famed linear storage limitation of their classical counterparts because they permit to completely eliminate crosstalk and spurious memories. The number of control qubits plays the role of an inverse fictitious temperature. The accuracy of pattern retrieval can be tuned by lowering the fictitious temperature under a critical value for quantum content association while the complexity of the retrieval algorithm remains polynomial for any number of patterns polynomial in the number of qubits. These models thus solve the capacity shortage problem of classical associative memories, providing a polynomial improvement in capacity. The price to pay is the probabilistic nature of information retrieval.
Quantum memories can be regarded as quantum channels that transmit information through time without moving it through space. Aiming at a reliable storage of information, we may thus not only encode at the beginning and decode at the end, but also intervene during the transmission-a possibility not captured by the ordinary capacities in quantum Shannon theory. In this paper, we introduce capacities that take this possibility into account and study them, in particular, for the transmission of quantum information via dynamical semigroups of Lindblad form. When the evolution is subdivided and supplemented by additional continuous semigroups acting on arbitrary block sizes, we show that the capacity of the ideal channel can be obtained in all cases. If the supplementary evolution is reversible, however, this is no longer the case. Upper and lower bounds for this scenario are proven. Finally, we provide a continuous coding scheme and simple examples showing that adding a purely dissipative term to a Liouvillian can sometimes increase the quantum capacity.