Parallelism in Logic

The work described in this book is the outcome of the author's contri butions to the design of a parallel inference machine in the Artificial Intelligence / Intellektik Group at the Computer Science Department of the Technical University in Munich. It is the revised version of a doctoral dissertation, submitted to the Technical University under the same title in 1990. The research was carried out in the frame work of the European ESPRIT programme, project 415: "Parallel Ar chitectures and Languages for Advanced Information Processing - A VLSI-directed Approach," with Philips Research Laboratories, Eind hoven, The Netherlands, as main contractor, and Nixdorf Computer AG, Paderborn, Germany, as subcontractor for subproject F. Out of the many people who helped me to accomplish this work, I owe the most to Prof. Dr. W. Bibel, who founded the Intellektik Group in Munich, initiated its participation in ESPRIT 415, and hired me for this project although my exposure to logic was rather limited at that time. My thesis advisor, Prof. E. Jessen, deserves a lot of gratitude for his superb supervision and constant encouragement, especially after Prof. Bibelleft Munich; without his help, it would have taken me even longer to complete this work. Many more people contributed to the research described here; an overview can be found in the back of the book (p. 269). My final thanks go to Catharine 0 'Shaughnessy for her patience and support, especially during the final stage."