The use of marker passing machines for symbolic processing

The drive for greater processing power has led to a desire to abandon conventional computer architectures and explore the possibilities presented by various highly parallel specialist architectures. Many of the finest grain architectures proposed have been connectionist in nature having a very large number of simple processors linked by a general communications network. One class of connectionist architecture which is of particular interest with a view to symbolic processing is known as parallel marker propagation machines or PMPMs for short. These are effectively semantic networks implemented in hardware with processors being divided into two classes corresponding to the nodes and links of the semantic network. A general circuit switched communications network links the processors to each other allowing any network topology to be set up