Evaluation Report 
					on the FGCS Project 

					  Wolfgang Bibel 
				  Technical University Darmstadt 
					    Germany 

					   4 June 1992 

Summary 

In this report I try to briefly evaluate the results of the Fifth Generation Computer 
Systems (FGCS) project. First, I describe my interactions with the researchers involved in 
the project in order to make the background of my judgment visible to the reader. Second, 
I clarify the criteria under which I undertake the evaluation. Within the evaluation itself 
given in section 3 my main points of appraisal of the technical achievements are 

- the demonstration of logic as a uniform and efficient framework for designing 
  machines and software at the same time; 
- the enormous gains demonstrated through using parallelism; and 
- the demonstration of the gains in efficiency by producing software in logic. 

Considering these and many other achievements of the project I judge it as an outstanding 
success. In section 4 1 then test some of the major hypotheses underlying the project and 
come to the conclusion that all of them were solid and proved successful. In the final 
section I have a few remarks for the future of ICOT and of research in the spirit of FGCS 
which include the suggestion to continue ICOT for a limited period of time and set up a 
Japanese Research Institute for basic research in Information technology. 


1. My interactions with ICOT research 

I am proud to be able to say that I have been in contact with the key persons of the FGCS 
project since its preparatory phase or, more precisely, since IJCAI-79 held in Tokyo in 
August 1979. In discussions with Dr. Fuchi during that conference it became clear to me 
that he and I shared the same vision of logic offering the potential for a uniform and 
comprehensive approach to building and using computers for programming, problem 
solving, and knowledge engineering.

In 1981, I was given the privilege to present one of the six invited lectures at the first 
FGCS conference. In this lecture I outlined my view of software development from a 
logical point of view, a view that is now beginning to emerge also within the FGCS 
project among the applications of tools such as MGTP to program synthesis (viz. the 
MENDELS ZONE system). 

I visited ICOT early in 1990 for about two weeks and became even more intimately 
familiar with many facets of the projects carried out within the framework of the FGCS 


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