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Hey Pentti, We Did It!: A Fully Vector-Symbolic Lisp

Published: October 18, 2025 | arXiv ID: 2510.17889v1

By: Eilene Tomkins-Flanagan, Mary A. Kelly

Potential Business Impact:

Makes computers understand complex math like a brain.

Business Areas:
RISC Hardware

Kanerva (2014) suggested that it would be possible to construct a complete Lisp out of a vector-symbolic architecture. We present the general form of a vector-symbolic representation of the five Lisp elementary functions, lambda expressions, and other auxiliary functions, found in the Lisp 1.5 specification McCarthy (1960), which is near minimal and sufficient for Turing-completeness. Our specific implementation uses holographic reduced representations Plate (1995), with a lookup table cleanup memory. Lisp, as all Turing-complete languages, is a Cartesian closed category, unusual in its proximity to the mathematical abstraction. We discuss the mathematics, the purpose, and the significance of demonstrating vector-symbolic architectures' Cartesian-closure, as well as the importance of explicitly including cleanup memories in the specification of the architecture.

Country of Origin
🇨🇦 Canada

Page Count
10 pages

Category
Computer Science:
Programming Languages