Paper
MASSIVELY PARALLEL ARCHITECTURES FOR Al: METL, THISTLE, AND BOLTZMANN MACHINES
It is becoming increasingly apparent that some aspects of intelligent behavior rcquirc enormous computational power and that some sort of massively parallel computing architecture is the most plausible way to deliver such power. Parallelism, rather than raw speed of the computing elements. seems to be the way that the brain gets such jobs done. But even if the need for massive parallelism is admitted, there is still the question of what kind of parallel architecture needs of various AI tasks. best fits the In this paper we will attempt to isolate a number of basic computational tasks that an intelligent system must perform. We will describe several families of massively parallel computing architectures, and we will see which of these computational tasks can be handled by each of these families. In particular, we will describe a new architecture, which we call the Boltzmann machine, whose abilities appear to include a number of tasks that are inefficient or impossible on the other architectures. FAMILIES OF PARALLEL ARCHITECTURES By “massively parallel ” architectures, we mean machines with a very large number of processing elements (perhaps very simple ones) working on a single task. A massively parallel system may be complete and self-contained or it may be a special-purpose device, performing some particular task as part of a larger system that contains other modules of a different character. In this paper we will focus on the computation performed by a single parallel module, ignoring the issue of how to integrate a collection of modules into a complete system.
Authors: Scott E. Fahlman · Geoffrey E. Hinton · Terrence J. Sejnowski