Content-addressable memories applied to execution of logic programs

The paper describes a number of techniques for using content-addressable memory to speed up the execution of logic programs for both single and multiple processor implementations. The techniques shown allow for significant speedups in unification, clause selection, branch switching, variable handling and garbage collection. For multiple processor implementations, the literal ordering and environment join algorithms are also improved. In addition to the speed improvements, some simplification of software results from performing indexing operations in content-addressable memory.