Half-CAM s

While it is rare that the housekeeping which can be performed under the guise of a automaton ever reaches the full generality of the Shannon canonical form, neither does it always have the permutational simplicity represented by apzoc; boolean combinations of pairs of planes, especially within CAM-A or CAM-B are especially common. The trace option, in which plane 1 records all the cells in plane 0 which were ever active, is a good example of the use of a plane .

Because the table layout of the CAM favors half-CAM s, and because they involve fewer variables, it is feasible to define functions such as booltab(r,,,,), whose arguments are the coefficients in the two-variable Shannon canonical form:

There are sixteen such functions altogether; their common names (using capital letters for complements) are:

If there were somehow uniformly short names or abbreviations for all these functions, especially single character abbreviations, mnemonic rather than numerical arguments could have been used; as it is this table or something similar will probably enjoy frequent consultation by someone setting up the functions.

---

Harold V. McIntosh
E-mail:mcintosh@servidor.unam.mx