Blackboard system
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
A blackboard system in computer science is composed of an area of shared memory, referred to as the blackboard, that contains a problem to be solved and a collection of software agents or processes, often referred to as knowledge sources, that can access and modify the blackboard. This architecture is often used in the field of artificial intelligence.
Each agent scans the changes to the blackboard, and posts an updated partial solution based on the state of the blackboard whenever its own internal conditions for doing so are met. These partial solutions cause other agents to update their portions of the solution on the blackboard until eventually an answer is found. In this fashion, the agents work together to solve the problem.
An interesting additional development is the introduction of the concept of history to the blackboard. Traditional blackboard consists out of the above mentioned shared memory area, which has no concept of temporal retainement of the data. In blackboard systems having this temporal history, the historical data can be requested using a query statement to an attached database engine which retains this historical data.
Famous examples are the Hearsay II speech recognition system and Douglas Hofstadter's Copycat and Numbo projects. The blackboard architecture appears to resemble human cognition and is often proposed as a cognitive science model.
[edit] References
- Robert S. Engelmore and Anthony Morgan, editors. Blackboard Systems. Addison-Wesley, 1988
[edit] External links
- Open Blackboard System An open source framework for developing blackboard systems.
- BBTech Corporation
- GBBopen
- SQLBusRT A Blackboard implementation with temporal historical data added.
- CMLabs, creators of the Psyclone AI operating system.
