International Chip Corp, Columbia, South Carolina has been commissioned by Ricoh Co to fabricate an artificial intelligence co-processor chip designd to eliminate the need for special software to run expert systems programs. The REX Resident EXpert chip is being offered in versions for AT-alikes, Sun Microsystems workstations and NEC Corp’s PC-9801 family. The co-processor board will be marketed with Rule Compiler software that provides people with no programming knowledge the means to develop applications – it prompts for input in plain English. Once the expert system has been developed with the Rule Compiler, it will run on any machine with the co-processor installed. The board stores rules as a series of if A, then B statements, and processes them directly rather than handing them over to the host fro processing, as has up to now usually been the case. It has local memory capacity for up to 10,000 rules. The boards cost $1,500 apiece from next month, and the Rule Compiler is $2,000 to $5,000. The current version of the chip runs at 10MHz – which translates to a rule-handling rate of 1.67m rules per sec ond, and a 20MHz version is planned for next spring. Ricoh’s Ricoh Corp subsidiary in West Caldwell, New Jersey is marketing it in the US.
