Applications of the Connection Machine

The Connection Machine development effort was initiated in the belief that parallel processing and artificial intelligence could together accelerate the rate of progress toward truly intelligent machines. This progress is the result of the ease with which the machine can be programmed and the dramatic increase in compute power that the machine can bring to bear. The authors have been able to run many trials of experiments in instances where previously, running just one would have been considered an achievement and no further experimentation would have been done. This has enabled exploring a great many more hypotheses and to work on much larger problems that had been possible on previous-generation artificial intelligence workstations. The ease of programming is in part the result of a decision to use existing serial machines (the Symbolics 3600 or Digital Equipment Corporation VAX), thus leaving unchanged the operating systems, editors, file systems, debuggers, network communications systems, and so on, so as to provide familiar programming environments. The Connection Machine is programmed in conservative extensions of Common Lisp and C. Users familiar with these languages and with front-end computer systems have been able to produce results on the Connection Machine on the first day that theymore » use it.« less