Guest Editor's Introduction New Computers for Artificial Intelligence Processing

T his special issue of Computer is about recent efforts to produce T hardware and software architectures that support artificial intelligence (Al) applications. The earliest computer design to support Al processing was the implementation of Lisp on the PDP-6 computer and its successors, the PDP-10 and PDP-20, all made by the Digital Equipment Corporation. The half-word instructions and the stack instructions of these machines were developed with Lisp's requirements in mind. Since then, we have been seeing a proliferation of specialpurpose computers that can support symbolic and Al processing. These efforts include the implementation in hardware of primitive operations fundamental to applications in Al, the design of a collection of primitive architectures to support more complex functions, and the design of system-level architectures to support one or more languages or knowledge-representation schemes.