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The Connection
Machine was the first commercial computer designed expressly to work
on simulating intelligence and life. A massively parallel supercomputer
with 65,536 processors, it was the brainchild of Danny Hillis, conceived
while he was a graduate student under Marvin Minsky at the MIT Artificial
Intelligence Lab. Departing from conventional computer architecture around 1990, it was modeled on the structure of a human brain: Rather than relying on a single powerful processor to perform calculations one after another, the data was distributed over the tens of thousands of processors, all of which could perform calculations simultaneously. |