APPLICATIONS OF OPTICAL BOOLEAN MATRIX OPERATIONS TO GRAPH-THEORY

The transition from optical numerical matrix algebra to optical Boolean matrix algebra is explored in detail. All important Boolean matrix algebra tasks can be performed optically. Quantitative measurement is replaced by a simple light-or-no-light decision, something optics can do well. The parallelism advantage of optics becomes greater as the matrix size increases. As an illustration of utility, we consider graph theory.