ADAPTIVE SELF-ORGANIZING LOGIC NETWORKS (PARALLEL, NEURAL MODELS, CONNECTIONIST, REAL-TIME, DISTRIBUTED)

Along with the development of contemporary computer science the limitations of sequential "von Neumann" machines have become more apparent. It is now becoming clear that to handle projected needs in speed and throughput, massively parallel architectures will be needed.;Problem specificiation is incremental and takes the form of if-then rules (instances) expressed as Boolean conjunctions. Possible applications include symbolic decision systems, propositional production systems, digital pattern recognition and real-time process control.;The approach is based on an adaptive network composed of many simple computing elements (nodes) which operate in a combinational and asynchronous fashion. Control and processing in the network is distributed amongst the network nodes. Adaptation and data processing form two separate phases of operation. During processing, the network acts as a parallel network of Boolean gates. Inputs and outputs of the network are also Boolean. During adaptation the network structure and the node functions can change to update the overall network function as specified. As new rules are added to the rule base, the network independently reconfigures to a logic circuit that remains both minimal and consistent with the rule base. Thus, there is no explicit programming. Desired network response is simply presented to the system, following which the network adjusts itself accordingly. Although the functionality of the network can be observed from the outside, the internal network structure is unknown.;The control of the adaptive process is almost completely distributed and efficiently exploits parallelism. Most communication takes place between neighboring nodes with only minimal need for centralized processing. The network modification is performed with considerable concurrency and the adaptation time grows only linearly with the depth of the network.;In this dissertation we propose a special purpose architectural model that satisfies a general class of propositional logic problems in a totally distributed and concurrent fashion. The architectural model is identified as ASOCS (Adaptive Self-Organizing Concurrent System).