Artificial Intelligence in Parallel: Working with many processors at once could accelerate computation enormously--and suggest new ways to think about thinking.

The current rage in the Artificial Intelligence (AI) community is parallelism: the idea is to build machines with many independent processors doing many things at once. The upshot is that about a dozen parallel machines are now under development for AI alone. As might be expected, the approaches are diverse yet there are a number of fundamental issues in common: granularity, topology, control, and algorithms.