A general purpose optical computer in which bits of a control vectors are optically ANDed with bits of a data vector in a vector-vector operation, and in which the results of the optical AND operations are ORed by way of threshold detectors to form combinatorial functionals and combinatorial summations,...http://www.google.co.uk/patents/US5164913?utm_source=gb-gplus-sharePatent US5164913 - General purpose optical computer
