The design and implementation of massively parallel knowledge representation and reasoning systems: a connectionist approach
D.R. Mani · 1996
Efficient knowledge representation and reasoning is an important component of intelligent activity, and is a crucial aspect in the design of large-scale intelligent systems. This dissertation explores the design, analysis, and implementation of massively parallel knowledge representation and reasoning systems which can encode very large knowledge bases and respond to a class of queries in real-time, with reasoning episodes expected to span a fraction of a second. The dissertation attempts to design efficient, large-scale knowledge base systems by: (i) exploiting massive parallelism; and (ii) constraining representational and inferential capabilities to achieve tractability, while still retaining sufficient expressive power to capture a broad class of reasoning in intelligent systems. To this end, shruti, a connectionist reasoning system which models reflexive--- i.e., effortless and spontaneous---reasoning serves as the knowledge representation and reasoning framework. Shruti-based mas...