Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!lll-winken!lll-lcc!ames!umd5!uvaarpa!mcnc!gatech!hubcap!ephraim
From: ephraim@Think.COM
Newsgroups: comp.hypercube
Subject: Re: Summary of Spang Robinson Report.
Message-ID: <1042@hubcap.UUCP>
Date: 1 Mar 88 18:59:47 GMT
Sender: fpst@hubcap.UUCP
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Approved: hypercube@hubcap.clemson.edu

In article <1036@hubcap.UUCP> fpst@hubcap.clemson.edu (Steve Stevenson-Moderator) writes:
>Summary of Spang Robinson Report on Supercomputing and Parallel Processing
>Volume 2, No. 1, January 1988

The notes on the Dow Jones project here at Thinking Machines seem to
have garbled slightly along the way:

>Dow Jones Informations has purchased a Connection Machine from
>Thinking Machines.  The systems uses the Information retrieval
>technique of "relevant factor" in which the user evaluates what is
>returned from the first query to generate successive paths.

The term more usually employed to describe the system is "relevance
feedback."  The user evaluates the material returned from an initial
query (that's "relevance") and can mark each item as "good" or "bad"
(that's "feedback").

>A second 32,000 processor is on order for March delivery.  One
>processor has 4.3% of the power of the entire world mainframe
>computer power.

A second 32K (i.e., 32,768) processor *system* is on order.  One
processor has 4.3% of the power of a plugged nickel.  32,768
processors connected in a system are a force to be reckoned with.

Ephraim Vishniac					  ephraim@think.com
Thinking Machines Corporation / 245 First Street / Cambridge, MA 02142-1214

     On two occasions I have been asked, "Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put
     into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?"