Michael Dixon, Johan de Kleer
De Kleer' s Assumption-based Truth Maintenance System (ATMS) is a propositional inference engine designed to simplify the construction of problem solvers that search complex search spaces efficiently. The ATMS has become a key component of many problem solvers, and often the primary consumer of computational resources. Although considerable effort has gone into designing and optimizing the LISP implementation, it now appears to be approaching the performance limitations of serial architectures. In this paper we show how the combination of a conventional serial machine and a massively parallel processor can dramatically speed up the ATMS algorithms, providing a very powerful general purpose architecture for problem solving.