Associative processing of line drawings

Abstract

The marriage of computer graphics and an associative memory is a natural union. This is evidenced by the widespread use of software simulations of associative memories in today's most flexible graphical systems. The content-addressability of a hardware associative memory makes conventional addressing schemes superfluous and eliminates the need for pointers required to link related data, vastly reducing system overhead. The parallel retrieval and update functions possible with a hardware associative memory remove any need for multiple storage which is so prevalent in current systems and simultaneously increases processing speed. The capability of implicitly storing relations between data further decreases the storage requirements, while increasing flexibility.