On non-numeric architecture

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Abstract
In this informal paper, we present what we believe is one of the major problems in computer science of the 70's and several approaches to the solution of this problem that are being studied by our group and by others. (A formal paper that includes a detailed bibliography on this topic is in preparation. Therefore, we are writing this paper in an informal style without references). A very large part of the computational load throughout the world is essentially business computation. Perhaps it is the majority of computation. Business computation is heavily oriented to data base management and information retrieval. We will refer to this type of computation as non-numeric processing. The main primitive operation here is the search. However, we are using standard von Neumann computers whose main primitive operation is addition. What is good for numeric problems like inverting large matrices is not necessarily good for non-numeric problems like searching large data bases. The hardware limitations of conventional von Neumann computers tend to straightjacket our approach to non-numeric processing.

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