Information Processing with an Associative Parallel Processor

Research into new computer structures, which would be better suited to non-numerical information processing tasks, has been in progress for some years.^1,2,3The problem has been to design a computing system with high hardware efficiency and low software complexity over a wide range of these applications. Recent research^4,5,6has indicated that these apparently conflicting requirements could possibly be achieved by a parallel processing system containing content-addressable storage. Hence there is a revival of interest in associative memories and associative processors.