NON-VON's applicability to three AI task areas

NON-VON is a massively parallel machine constructed using custom VLSI chips, each containing a number of simple processing elements A preliminary prototype is now operational at Columbia University The machine is intended to provide highly efficient support for a wide range of artificial intelligence and other symbolic applications This paper briefly describes the current version of the NON-VON machine and presents evidence for its applicability to the execution of OPS5 production systems, a number of low-and intermediate-level computer vision tasks, and certain "difficult" relational algebraic operations relevant to knowledge base management Analytic and simulation results are presented for a number of algorithms The data suggest that NON-VON could provide a performance improvement of as much as two to three orders of magnitude over a conventional sequential machine for a wide range of AI tasks