associative

Adjective

associative (comparative more associative, superlative most associative)

1. Pertaining to, resulting from, or characterised by association; capable of associating; tending to associate or unite.
   • At present conditioning is viewed as a special case of associative learning which provides an animal (and human being alike) with die ability to discover, memorize, retrieve, and use relationships between signals and reinforcers and also to control rewards and aversive events.1998, Kazimierz Zieliński, “Pairing, Continuity, Contingency - What's the Difference”, in Anna Neugebauer, editor, Macromolecular Interplay in Brain Associative Mechanisms: Proceedings of the...
   • Sometimes the attempt was made to reduce the inner to the outer world (Condillac, Mach, Avenarius, materialism); sometimes the outer to the inner world (Descartes, Berkeley, Fichte); sometimes the sphere of the absolute to the others (e.g., by trying to infer causally the essence and existence of...2014, Volker Meja, Nico Stehr, Knowledge and Politics
2. Such that, for any operands a,b and c, (a*b)*c=a*(b*c); (of a ring, etc.) whose multiplication operation is associative.
   • Perhaps it is an advantage of the "associative algebraic geometry" we have tried to develop in foregoing chapters that it is independent of braidings and further generalizations because it will remain valid as long as the corresponding "function"-rings constructed in these theories are associative...2000, Freddy Van Oystaeyen, Algebraic Geometry for Associative Algebras, Marcel Dekker, page 235
   • It is now generally accepted that the representation theory of associative algebras traces its origin to Hamilton's description of the complex numbers by pairs of real numbers.2006, Ibrahim Assem, Daniel Simson, Andrzej Skowroński, Elements of the Representation Theory of Associative Algebras, 1: Techniques of Representation Theory, Cambridge University Press, page vii
3. Addressable by a key more complex than an integer index.
   • AWK's associative arrays may be indexed by strings.
   • Associative memories were once given considerable attention.