Parallel electro-optical rule-based system for fast execution of expert systems

This paper proposes the use of optics for a fast and parallel implementation of rule-based systems. The proposed optical system is hybrid in nature in which electronics is used for the user interface and optics for the rule-based inference engine. The proposed system uses two-dimensional planes as basic computational entities, and is therefore able to provide concurrent rule processing. Furthermore, it provides very efficient implementation of the basic operation needed in rule-based systems, namely, matching, selection, and rule firing. The execution speed of the proposed system is theoretically estimated and is shown to be potentially orders of magnitude faster than current systems