Computino Facilities

At the recent AAAI conference at Stanford, it became apparent that many new AI research centers are being established around the country in industrial and governmental settings and in universities that have not paid much attention to Al in the past. What does an AI researcher want from his computing facility? What will make him most productive? In fact, the needs of the Al researcher are not very different from the needs of any other researcher in computer science, except that facility-related problems seem to become acute in AI a few years sooner than they are felt in other research areas The considerations are roughly as follows: 0 AI programs tend to be very large because they contain, in one form or another, a lot of knowledge. It follows, then, that any machine used for AI must provide a large virtual address space in order to insulate the researcher from having to think about how to chop up his task into smaller tidbits and overlays.