Parallel implementation of a class reasoner

One method to overcome the notorious efficiency problems of logical reasoning algorithms in AI has been to combine a general-purpose reasoner with several special-purpose reasoners for commonly used subtasks. In this paper we are using Schubert’s (Schubert et al. 1983, 1987) method of implementing a special-purpose class reasoner. We show that it is possible to replace Schubert’s preorder number class tree by a preorder number list without loss of functionality. This form of the algorithm lends itself perfectly towards a parallel implementation,1 and we describe design, coding and testing of such an implementation. Our algorithm is practically independent of the size of the class list, and even with several thousand nodes learning times are under a second and retrieval times are under 500 ms.