a new technology and when so little is known about it. This allows one to see a problem 
under different yet related views and helps progressing to solve it. For example the 
work on parallel implementation of KL1 is useful in its own right but it also provides 
insight for other problems as well, e.g. for KBMS implementation. 

I believe logic is the right choice that had to be made to investigate knowledge based 
systems; I have argued elsewhere that it does not mean that there is only logic in the 
practical world but there is no contradiction here. Perhaps this perspective should 
have guided ICOT more towards integration of logic to other environments than it did. 

I will not criticise the choice of KL1 against the choice of logic languages a la Prolog; 
it is important to understand the limits of each approach; if the parallel implementa-
tions of Prolog a la Andorra work well (on truly large scale problems), fine; otherwise 
we know we have solutions a la KL1; it is early in the game to know for sure. 

In general I am surprised positively by the speed at which the researchers have 
picked up the background that they encountered elsewhere during their research to 
make novel proposals; constraint logic programming is one such example where the 
progress made is significant, even though they were not the first players. 

When it cornes to discuss specific results, it is difficult to single out one of them, 
because the areas covered are so different. I only would like to mention again the fact 
that all the work done on parallel systems implementations will definitely bear fruit in 
a non distant future, directly or indirectly. I feel that the work on knowledge bases is 
not as foolproof as some of the other work done in the project and that the QUIXOTE 
environment, although its is appealing when one considers all the features it integrates, 
would need more testbench work before it can be adopted because I find it complex 
and lacking some of the features that such complex semantic representation systems 
need (see below). The work on parallel theorem provers embodies some nice results 
and has shown that it goes beyond state of the art; however I have some reservation 
due to the fact that parallelism cannot be the answer to all difficult problems. The 
work on constraint languages is very interesting and one of the very few to allow to use 
non linear constraints; this work shows the high level of skill with which the develop-
ments have taken place; there is also room for improvement here because again speed 
is probably not the only answer. I will not comment much further individual results 
except to say that case based reasoning may appear to be easier to do now than before 
(until we run into other speed bareers ...) 

2 FUTURE WORK 

There is a list of actions which could be mentioned here; I will only stress some of 
my main points. 


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