CAPS: a connectionist architecture for production systems

CAPS supports most features of the OPS5 language, including variables, negation, and conjunction and disjunction of conditions. The architecture uses local representations to facilitate dynamic variable bindings and to reduce the number of interconnections within the network, thus making hardware implementations more feasible. The CAPS processing elements are simple and relatively easy to fabricate. A hardware implementation of a CAPS network can potentially provide a 200-800 fold increase in parallelism over serial implementations. The CAPS architecture is tested by transforming small OPS5 programs into connectionist networks and simulating them on a connectionist simulator. It is demonstrated that connectionist architectures can perform rule-based symbolic reasoning and can support dynamic variable bindings