Artificial Intelligence is entering the mainstream of com­ puter applications and as techniques are developed and integrated into a wide variety of areas they are beginning to tax the pro­ cessing power of conventional architectures. To meet this demand, specialized architectures providing support for the unique features of symbolic processing languages are emerging. The goal of the research presented here is to show that an archi­ tecture specialized for Prolog can achieve a ten-fold improve­ ment in performance over conventional, general-purpose architec­ tures. This book presents such an architecture for high perfor­ mance execution of Prolog programs. The architecture is based on the abstract machine descrip­