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 I 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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