Computers and Thought Award : Challenges of Massive Parallelism

Artificial Intelligence has been the field of study for exploring the principles underlying thought, and utilizing their discovery to develop use­ ful computers. Traditional AI models have been, consciously or subconsciously, optimized for available computing resources which has led AI in certain directions. The emergence of mas­ sively parallel computers liberates the way in­ telligence may be modeled. Although the AI community has yet to make a quantum leap, there are attempts to make use of the opportu­ nities offered by massively parallel computers, such as memory-based reasoning, genetic algorithms , and other novel models. Even within the traditional AI approach, researchers have begun to realize that the needs for high per­ formance computing and very large knowledge bases to develop intelligent systems requires massively parallel AI techniques. In this Com­ puters and Thought Award lecture, I will argue that massively parallel artificial intelligence will add new dimensions to the ways that the AI goals are pursued, and demonstrate that mas­ sively parallel artificial intelligence is where AI meets the real world.