In the demo above and in the original article, the model captures what someone might know about characters inspired from the 1961 musical "West Side Story", in which two gangs (the "Jets" and the "Sharks") fight for territory and overall dominance.
Units, the activation level of which represents the fact that the feature they stand for is true to some degree, are organized in separate groups, each corresponding to the different possible values of a single feature, such as the name of an individual, his age, his education level, his marital status, his occupation, or the gang to which he belongs.
All units within a group are connected to each other by inhibitory connections, so that when one becomes active it will tend to inhibit the others, thus reflecting the fact that one cannot be both 30 years of age and 40 years of age, for instance.
All the units corresponding to the features that characterize a single individual are linked through excitatory connections to a single unit (see the two inner circles) that binds this individual's various features together, thus representing the model's memory of that individual.
