Computer-implemented perceptual apparatus

An autonomous memory for compressing a digital representation of an input stimulus, comprising:

• a memory bank that stores (i) the digital representation and (ii) a Jacobian that maps a feature space to a non-Euclidean perceptual space according to a perceptual system that is capable of perceiving the stimulus;
• autonomous memory operator circuitry (AMO) communicably coupled with the memory bank;
• wherein the AMO is configured to receive input from a multithreaded processor core (MPC) and perform data operations independent of the MPC;
• at least one memory input/output (TO) port, each memory IO port configured to receive instructions from the AMO and to access the memory bank;
• and
• data operator circuitry (DO) configured to receive data from the at least one memory IO port and to modify the received data by implementing functions on the received data;
• the memory bank storing machine-readable instructions that, when executed by the AMO and the DO, control the autonomous memory to, independently of the MPC:
• read the digital representation from the memory bank using the at least one memory IO port and transmit the digital representation to the DO,
• encode the digital representation as a feature vector within the feature space,
• multiply the feature vector with a Jacobian that maps the feature space to a non-Euclidean perceptual space according to a perceptual system that is capable of perceiving the input stimulus, wherein said multiplying generates a perceptual vector within the non-Euclidean perceptual space,
• apply an update operator to the perceptual vector to move the perceptual vector in the perceptual space to an updated vector such that the updated vector has a lower entropy than the perceptual vector,
• round the updated vector into a compressed vector, and
• store the compressed vector in the memory bank via the at least one memory IO port, wherein a first amount of the memory bank used to store the compressed vector is less than a second amount of the memory bank used to store the digital representation.