An artificial intelligence (AI) workstation is purchased for use in the newly established Engineering Expert Systems Lab. The acquisition of such equipment will considerably enhance the research efforts of a large number of faculty involved in the development of expert systems, primarily in the areas of mechanical design and manufacturing. Development of such systems involves the use of symbolic languages, such as LISP and PROLOG, but the architecture of general purpose computers is not suitable for such languages. Additional hardware is needed for fast symbolic and logical processing, as well as additional local memory, to increase efficiency. AI workstations fulfill these needs and thus reduce considerably the development time for expert systems.
