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Parallel Problem Solving

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Book cover Parallel Algorithms for Machine Intelligence and Vision

Part of the book series: Symbolic Computation ((1064))

Abstract

Problem-reduction based problem solving is a technique that is used when there are multiple methods that may be used to solve a subproblem, and more important, each method may involve solving multiple subproblems consistently. We present an overview of our research in executing such problem solving computations in parallel. The traditional AND OR tree representation is shown to be inadequate for representing parallel evaluations, and REDUCE OR trees are presented as a more suitable representation that can capture more parallelism. As Logic Programming and Horn-Clause theorem proving have much in common with problem solving, the representation is useful for parallel execution in these domains also. A parallel execution scheme for logic programs is described that is based on REDUCE-OR trees. Parallel implementation of this scheme, as well as other parallel computations, is facilitated by a run time support system that allows us to run the parallel interpreter on many different shared memory and message passing machines. In problem solving, as in search, there may be multiple solutions. It is useful but difficult to minimize the time to first solution in a parallel system. We discuss several strategies that help achieve this objective. Performance of these strategies on multiprocessors and on a simulation system is also discussed.

The research reported here was supported in part by a National Science Foundation grant CCR-87-00988.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois, 1304 W. Springfield Ave, Urbana, IL, 61801, USA

    L. V. Kaié

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  1. L. V. Kaié
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Computer Science Department, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, 55455, USA

    Vipin Kumar

  2. IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, NY, 10598, USA

    P. S. Gopalakrishnan

  3. LNK Corporation, Riverdale, MD, 20737, USA

    Laveen N. Kanal

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© 1990 Springer-Verlag New York Inc.

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Kaié, L.V. (1990). Parallel Problem Solving. In: Kumar, V., Gopalakrishnan, P.S., Kanal, L.N. (eds) Parallel Algorithms for Machine Intelligence and Vision. Symbolic Computation. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-3390-9_5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-3390-9_5

  • Publisher Name: Springer, New York, NY

  • Print ISBN: 978-1-4612-7994-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-4612-3390-9

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

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