- an elegant Guarded Horn Clause language, with an efficient implementation. 
I must say I have not been so much impressed by the demonstrated applications: even if 
they are of very high quality, I feel that similar experiments are (or have been) 
developped elsewhere, on more traditional plateforms. Even if these applications show 
that the FGCS environment is truly operational and usable, they do not clearly 
demonstrate the specific added-value of the "PIM+PIMOS+KL1+KBMS+GDCC" 
integrated system. A specific effort should therefore be made to make visible the elegance 
of code, ease-of-programming, and resulting efficiency obtained through the use of the 
FGCS development plateform and environment. 

The main so called "sociological" achievements of FGCS Project are: 

- ICOT is internationally recognized as a strong research point in Logic 
Programming, Concurrency and Parallel Architectures, and more generally, Japan is now 
considered as an important country in computer science. Ten to fifteen years ago, Japan 
was hardly recognized as a partner in the research community in Computer Science 
(although some individuals were already quite well-known). It is now obvious that Japan 
plays a major role in CS-research : ETL, ICOT, NTT Laboratories, Tokyo University,
among some others, are well-known abroad. This is probably due, up to a large extent, to 
the fact that the FGCS Project drew attention of the scientific community to what was 
happening here. 

- FGCS has given credibility to Logic Programming and to artificial intelligence. 
Before the announcement of FGCS, these domains and the corresponding technologies 
were considered as pure "research toys" by policy-makers and by the industry. 

- FGCS had a major political impact in all western countries I think for instance 
that the launching of the ESPRIT program was up to a large extent a European political 
answer to FGCS. In this respect, FGCS has strongly boosted I.T. R&D all over the world. 

- Japan has now some highly-skilled researchers and engineers, who can be 
considered as top-level experts in the domains of machine architecture, parallel operating 
systems, logic programming and knowledge-based systems. 


Maximizing the benefits of the Project 

FGCS has been a major basic research effort. It is the author's view that some decisions 
have to be taken and some actions have to be launched in order to maximize the benefits 
of the Project, both for Japan and for the whole scientific community. 

The decision to make all the resulting software freely available to third-parties is, of 
course, a very positive point. It is a clear sign showing the willingness of the Japanese 
government to support full participation of its research laboratories to the international 
effort for the progress of knowledge. But in my view, this decision is not sufficient and 
some additional decisions should be taken to obtain full benefit from the FGCS effort. 

This decision will take its full effect only if a large community of users have the 
possibility to develop applications with the FGCS environment and tools. Existence of a 
large community of "advanced-users", developing original applications, exchanging 
information on their experiments, and reporting to ICOT (or its successor) any 
encountered problem (bug, functional limitation, etc.) will be the most powerful way to 
convince the I.T. community that FGCS has been a true success. 

This will happen only if MITI decides to maintain a strong research team active in the 
domains of logic programming, parallel architectures and concurrency, theorem proving 
etc. The role of this team will be to keep the FGCS environment (KL1+PIMOS+KBMS+-


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