  Associative memories are structures that store data in such a way that it can
later be retrieved given only a part of its content -- a sort-of
error/erasure-resilience property. They are used in applications ranging from
caches and memory management in CPUs to database engines. In this work we study
associative memories built on the maximum likelihood principle. We derive
minimum residual error rates when the data stored comes from a uniform binary
source. Second, we determine the minimum amount of memory required to store the
same data. Finally, we bound the computational complexity for message
retrieval. We then compare these bounds with two existing associative memory
architectures: the celebrated Hopfield neural networks and a neural network
architecture introduced more recently by Gripon and Berrou.
