Hippocampus

Pre-computed anchor-to-chunk concept index for fast O(1) memory retrieval.

Paper: J2 — Concept Index for O(1) Memory Retrieval Status: Production (deployed 6+ months) Vanilla OpenClaw: Yes — drop-in installation

What It Does

Enhances memory retrieval by maintaining a pre-computed concept index where each anchor maps directly to relevant memory chunks — bypassing scan-time search for known concepts. Importance scoring and deduplication prevent the index from growing stale. The episodic buffer holds recent events in fast-access storage before they are consolidated into long-term memory.

Install

1. Copy this folder to ~/.openclaw/workspace/extensions/hippocampus/
2. Add to openclaw.json:

{
  "plugins": {
    "allow": ["hippocampus"],
    "entries": {
      "hippocampus": {
        "enabled": true,
        "config": {}
      }
    }
  }
}

3. Restart gateway

Configuration

No configuration options. The concept index is fully managed by the core memory system.

Dependencies

• Required: Total Recall (tinkerclaw-total-recall) — Hippocampus enhances Total Recall's retrieval layer and has no effect without it
• Optional: none

How It Works

Hippocampus is a registration stub. The core implementation lives inside the gateway's memory subsystem at src/memory/engram/. This extension exists solely to register the plugin ID with the discovery system so the openclaw.json entry passes validation. All hooks — importance scoring, deduplication, episodic buffer management, and concept index construction — are wired into the gateway at build time via that subsystem, not here at runtime. No register() body is needed.