---
title: "On Supporting Associative Access and Processing over Dynamic Knowledge Bases"
authors:
  - "Ian N. Robinson"
doi: ""
url: "https://ijcai.org/proceedings/1991/8"
pdf: "https://ijcai.org/proceedings/1991/0008.pdf"
venue: "Proceedings of the Twelfth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence"
year: 1991
pages: "48-54"
track: "Architectures & Languages"
keywords:
---

# On Supporting Associative Access and Processing over Dynamic Knowledge Bases

Ian N. Robinson

*Proceedings of the Twelfth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence*, pages 48-54.

## Abstract

Dynamic knowledge bases are a fact oflife in many artificial intelligence applications. Using current techniques, however, it is not always possible to provide the desired level of associative access to them whilst meeting real-time, or even near-real-time, performance criteria. This paper argues the case for a hardware associative storage system that uses symbolic pattern matching as its access mechanism. A working prototype of such a system, designed as a co-processor for a workstation host, is then described. The coprocessor is based on an array of custom designed VLSI 'smart memory' chips. These combine storage and search/processing logic on the same die. Parallelism is exploited both on chip and between chips to yield a high system performance. The paper concludes with some examples of how this hardware can be used to support real applications.