The Rochester checkers player: multimodel parallel programming for animate vision

Abstract

It is maintained that to exploit fully the parallelism inherent in animate vision systems, an integrated vision architecture must support multiple models of parallelism. To support this claim, the hardware base of a typical animate vision laboratory and the software requirements of applications are described. A brief overview is then given of the Psyche operating system, which was designed to support multimodel programming. A complex animate vision application, checkers, constructed as a multimodel program under Psyche, is also described. Checkers demonstrates the advantages of decomposing animate vision systems by function and independently selecting an appropriate parallel-programming model for each function.