Abst rac t The goal of the RAP-WAM AND-parallel Prolog abstract architecture is to provide inference speeds significantly beyond those of sequential systems, while supporting Prolog semantics and preserving sequential performance and storage efficiency. This paper presents simulation results supporting these claims with special emphasis on memory performance on a two-level sharedmemory multipro...

To help get our bearings in a complex and ever-changing world, it is useful to ask what the world will look like in a decade or two. Forecasting the future accurately is of course impossible. And of course we cannot forecast surprises, by definition. But by projecting known trends and tendencies, it is possible to say a remarkable amount about the broad outlines of the world one to two decades ...

Many researchers – and their advisors on research method – adopt a doctrine called empiricism, which claims that researchers may only use empirical methods. This restrictive doctrine impoverishes any academic discipline where it is dominant. The main reason is that a discipline only qualifies for the status of a science after it has progressed beyond empirical generalisations to explanatory the...