ASSOCIATION STORING PROCESSOR. VOLUME II.

The recent increase in the importance of such computer applications as fact retrieval and language translation, has made apparent the need for general purpose computers which can efficiently process non-numerical problems. With the objective of satisfying this need, an unconventional computer concept, called the Association-Storing Processor, has been defined, and the basic organization, operation, and logic design of two processors designed to implement this concept have been developed. The concept is based upon the representation of information as a directed graph. The data items are the nodes of the graph. Associations between pairs of items are explicitly represented by labels placed on the edges links of the graph. These associations are the basic units of data. All processes performed upon this data are stated in terms of a single type of instruction. Each instruction specifies conditions to be met by the data, and transformations to be performed upon the data if the conditions are met. The instructions and programs themselves, like the data, are represented as directed graphs, and are stored with the data. The processor organizations designed to implement this concept are based upon the use of a main memory which has the parallel search capability of an associative memory, plus the capability to select the conjunction of two or more sets of items in parallel. Instruction processing is performed almost entirely within this memory by logic distributed at the bit and word levels of the storage cells. The approach is directed at taking advantage of the parallel processing permitted by the instruction and of the characteristics of the developing large scale integrated circuit techniques. Author