This report describes the system design of an all-digital computer for visual recognition. One processor, the Pattern Articulation Unit (PAU), has been singled out for detailed discussion. Other units, in particular the Arithmetic Unit and the Taxicrinic Unit, are treated in reports listed in the bibliography. The PAU has been shown to be a processor of fundamentally new design-its logical organization has no analog in the central processing unit of existing computers. The PAU is the first modular parallel processor which because of its digital organization is capable of more reliable visual identification than part analog/part digital preprocessors of much less generality and potential virtuosity; is faster than any presently suggested alternative realizable today at comparable cost; and can serve as a prototype to a new generation of parallel computers that will capitalize upon thin film and integrated semiconductor circuitry of the immediate future.

The Illinois Pattern Recognition Computer-ILLIAC III

Simulation of process of forming the language for description and analysis of the forms of images

The development of data analysis systems for bubble chambers, for spark chambers and for counter experiments

Publisher Summary This chapter discusses the importance and the impact of the introduction of computer techniques in the use of the nuclear bubble chamber and more recently the spark chamber. The chapter discusses the automatic collection and reduction of data first for bubble chambers and then for spark chambers. It presents those properties of the bubble chamber that have resulted in its immense popularity among high energy experimental physicists. The geometry of a nuclear interaction that has occurred in a bubble chamber may be reconstructed from stereo photographs to a high degree of precision. The detection medium is also the interaction target, therefore the exact point in space where the interaction between beam and target particle occurs may be measured. The vertex of an unstable particle decay that has taken place in the chamber may be similarly reconstructed and measured. It also discusses some other interesting, but not widely used nuclear particle trace-detection schemes.

R. Narasimhan

Papers

Design of a pattern recognition digital computer with application to the automatic scanning of bubble chamber negatives