Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences

First-order Horn logic is a useful formalism to design knowledge-based systems. When implemented on a sequential von Neumann computer, the main limitation of such systems is performance. We present a message-driven model for function-free Horn logic, where the knowledge base is represented as a network of logical processing elements communicating with one another exclusively through messages. The lack of centralized control and centralized memory makes this model suitable to implementation on a highly-parallel asynchronous computer architecture.

The primary contribution of this paper is a performance analysis of this message-driven system and a comparison with a sequential resolution scheme using backtracking. For both approaches, closed form expressions for the performance results are derived and compared.