Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The ability to represent structured knowledge and use that knowledge in a systematic way is a very important ingredient of cognition. A n often heard criticism of connection ism is that connectionists ystems cannot possess that ability. The work reported in this paper demonstrates that a connectionist system can not only represent structured knowledge aind display systematic behavior, but can also do so with extreme efficiency. The paper describes a connectionist system that can represent knowledge expressed as rules and fads involving muhi-place predicates, and draw limited,but sound, inferences based on this knowledge.The system is extremely efficient - in fact, optimal,as it draws conclusions in time proportion alto the length of the proof. Central to this ability of the system is a solution to the variable binding problem. The solution makes use of the notion of a phased clock and exploits the time dimension to create and propagate variable bindings.