Parallel Electro-Optical Rule-Based System for Fast Execution of Expert Systems

A hybrid electro-optical rule-based system (EORBS) is proposed for the fast and parallel implementation of rule-based systems (RBS's). The EORBS is a hybrid system in which electronics is used for the user interface and optics for the inference engine. The EORBS utilizes two-dimensional optical planes as basic computational entities, and is therefore able to provide concurrent inferencing. Unlike conventional RBS's, EORBS provides parallel matching, selection and rule-firing. The thereotical performance of EORBS is estimated and is shown superior to pure electornic RBS's.