A parallel implementation of a belief maintenance system

An algorithm to perform belief maintenance was implemented on the Butterfly Plus parallel processor. This algorithm, which handles reasoning with uncertainty, is used in a system that performs classification problem solving. The belief maintenance scheme uses a network to represent a hypothesis of the domain. The belief updating scheme is inherently parallel; incoming evidence can be attached to any number of different modes in the network and the impact of the evidence can be propagated through the network in parallel. Results show that a substantial improvement in the processing speed of belief updating can be realized, especially in cases where a great deal of evidence is entered into the system at one time