and universities and its policy to exchange researchers in its laboratory after their 
temporary stay at ICOT. Not only have these researchers learned more than would have 
been possible by mere education, but they also were exposed to international cooperation 
and now enjoy the possibility to continue these contacts at their respective institutions. 
Since before this project Japan had some problems with opening up to the international 
research community, I regard this effect as one of extreme importance for the future 
prospects of Japanese ability to remain a leader in information technology scientifically 
as well as economically. As a German I wished my country would have taken similarly 
wise moves in this respect, especially in the area of machine design and architecture. 

Not only has the project changed the infrastructure in Japan, but also the one of the 
international research community. While previously western scientists rarely took their 
Japanese colleagues into serious consideration, now Japanese scientists in information 
technology are considered as equal partners a par with any others. Japanese researchers 
present their results more than ever before in international journals and conferences. Vice 
versa, Japanese journals (like the Future Generation Computer Systems Journal) and 
Japanese conferences (like the FGCS) are regarded as esteemed stages for the 
presentation of scientific results for scientists from all-over the world. The fact that Japan 
will host again in 1997 one of the most influential and largest conferences in information 
technology, namely IJCAI, underlines the respect with which our Japanese colleagues. 
are regarded by the rest of the world. 

Finally, and most importantly, I am genuinely impressed by the scientific achievements 
of this remarkable project. For the first time in our field, there is a uniform approach to 
both hardware and software design through a single language, viz. KL1. 

On the one hand, the machines built under the framework named PIM all are designed for 
the special purpose of executing KL1 programs which makes this execution remarkably 
efficient. On the other hand, all software is built on top of KL1. This is an exciting 
achievement for a number of reasons, some of which I will mention in the sequel. 

Remember that KL1 is (sort of) a logical language. The rest of the computing world 
ignored logic as useful vehicle for computation mainly for two reasons, namely for its 
alleged inappropriateness for state-dependent software (such as an operating system) and 
for its inefficiency. The FGCS project has given proof that both concerns are actually 
wrong. Firstly, the kernel of the operating system for the PIM machines is part of KL1's 
realization, while the rest of the operating system is built as a large software system, 
called PIMOS, which is all written in KL1 using the kernel operating system functions 
contained in it (with about 133K lines of code). Logic can well be used as a formalism to 
cope with systems which are state sensitive as PIMOS proves. Secondly, the realization 
of KL1 is extremely efficient as the application software systems (like MGTP and many 
others) demonstrate in a remarkable way. 

The other part of the basic software built on top of KL1 is a knowledge base management 
system, Kappa-P, on top of which Quixote, a knowledge representation language is built. 
It is less surprising that a logical language like KL1 is suitable for knowledge 
representation. The remarkable feature, however, is that the basis is exactly the same as 
the one for the operating system. The optimization efforts could therefore be concentrated 
on the realization of KL1 on the machines with the benefits for PIMOS and Kappa-P 
falling out for free. 

Logic as a uniform and efficient framework is thus one of the outstanding results of the 
project. Aspects of this are 
- the view of hardware and software design as an integral part of the problem of 


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