Pattern Knowledge and Search: The SUPREM Architecture

We present a new problem solving architecture based upon extremely fast search and pattern recognition. This architecture, which we have named SUPREM, has been implemented in the chess machine/program Hitech, and has proven to be very successful. We describe the implementation in Hitech and the reasons for its success, and compare the SUPREM architecture to other well known problem solving architectures. Certain interesting phenomena have become exposed as the result of our work with Hitech. The most important of these is that: "The further a process can look ahead, the less detailed knowledge it needs." We have also found that patterns can be formulated for quite complex problems in relatively small pattern recognizers, by eschewing generality and concentrating on likely patterns and their redundancies. This research was sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DOD), ARPA Order No. 4976, monitored by the Air Force Avionics Laboratory Under Contract F33615-84-K-1520, and by an IBM graduate student Fellowship. Current Address:Department of Computer Science, FR-35, University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195