The Energy Economy of Imagination: A Dual-Memory Architecture for Autonomous Systems

This paper presents UMA (Universal Memory Architecture), a novel cognitive architecture that models imagination as an energy investment. The system maintains two distinct memory structures: a Real Cortex for ground-truth experiences and a Dream Cortex for synthetic experiences. A controlled experiment demonstrates that dreaming improves survival by +6.80% (p = 0.005) and produces a positive net ROI of 0.848 (84.8%). The system is implemented with <35 KB RAM and microsecond-scale query latencies, suitable for low-power autonomous systems.

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Publication Details

Journal
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
Published
2026-08-24
DOI
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22082988
Primary Topic
Parallel Computing and Optimization Techniques
Type
article
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article

The Energy Economy of Imagination: A Dual-Memory Architecture for Autonomous Systems

Darius Puzinas
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
Parallel Computing and Optimization Techniques
article

The Energy Economy of Imagination: A Dual-Memory Architecture for Autonomous Systems

Darius Puzinas
article en

Abstract

This paper presents UMA (Universal Memory Architecture), a novel cognitive architecture that models imagination as an energy investment. The system maintains two distinct memory structures: a Real Cortex for ground-truth experiences and a Dream Cortex for synthetic experiences. A controlled experiment demonstrates that dreaming improves survival by +6.80% (p = 0.005) and produces a positive net ROI of 0.848 (84.8%). The system is implemented with <35 KB RAM and microsecond-scale query latencies, suitable for low-power autonomous systems.

Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
Affordable and clean energy
Openalex Percentile: Top 5%
Parallel Computing and Optimization Techniques
DOIOpen Access PDFOpenAlex
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The Energy Economy of Imagination: A Dual-Memory Architecture for Autonomous Systems — Darius Puzinas · Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) (2026) | TGRS Research Map | TGRS