Abstract: An apparatus using electrophoresis provides accurate manipulation of an object on a microscope stage for further manipulations add reactions. The present invention also provides an inexpensive and easily accessible means to move an object without damage to the object. A plurality of electrodes are coupled to the stage in an array whereby the electrode array allows for distinct manipulations of the electric field for accurate manipulations of the object. There is an electrode array control coupled to the plurality of electrodes for manipulating the electric field. In an alternative embodiment, a chamber is provided on the stage to hold the object. The plurality of electrodes are positioned in the chamber, and the chamber is filled with fluid. The system can be automated using visual servoing, which manipulates the control parameters, i.e., x, y stage, applying the field, etc., after extracting the significant features directly from image data.

Abstract: A method for determining whether a perceived target is acceptably close to a model target. The perceived target is first segmented using a relaxation based procedure. Structural features from the perceived target are extracted by producing a compact one-dimensional description of the perceived target's boundary. Said structural features are classified by using string-to-string matching, wherein one of two symbolic strings is a representation of the compact one-dimensional description of the boundary of the perceived target, and the other of said two symbolic strings is a pre-stored representation of the model target. The string-to-string matching entails measuring the distance between the two strings based upon deletion, insertion, and substitution of symbols from one string to the other. Performing the string-to-string matching measures how closely local structural features of the perceived target resemble local structural features of the model target.

Abstract: A systolic array (1) for reducing the time required to solve an algorithm having cyclic loop dependency, i.e., nested loops in which values calculated by inner loops depend upon indices of said inner loops and upon indices of outer loops. The array (1) comprises a chain of several identical serially connected and sequentially accessed cells. In the preferred embodiment, each cell, except for first and last cells in the chain, is connected to its two adjacent cells only. Multiprocessing is employed: at certain times during the algorithm solving, more than one cell is simultaneously activated to perform portions of the solving, so that the total time required to solve the algorithms is shortened to be a linear function of n.times.m. The algorithm can represent measurement of the distance between two symbolic strings, or other problems in artificial intelligence or logic.