I was invited to attend FGCS'92 in order to evaluate its progress and present a 
report in the "Project Evaluation Workshop". Hence I will focus in my report on the 
workshop.  

The workshop seemed like a well-orchestrated psychological warfare against the two 
MITI officials attending, with side-effects for the representatives of the "private sec-
tor", i.e. lab chiefs from the participating companies. The troops used in this warfare  
were the "Logic Programming Mafia", who stood up, one after another, praised the 
Fifth Generation Project, and urged the MITI officials to extend the lifespan of ICOT.  

Even though the different presentations were not coordinated (as far as I know),  
they showed remarkable uniformity of opinion. So perhaps the opinions expressed were  
sensible after all. All speakers praised the project for its achievements, noting espe-
cially (F)GHC and PIMOS as the notable achievements. GHC was praised for being an 
innovative and elegant concurrent logic programming language. PIMOS was praised 
for being a complete operating system built from the ground up using FGHC/KL1. 

Most of the speakers also claimed that the hardware developed by the project was 
of a lesser long-term significance. Some went as far as saying that investing so much in 
hardware development was a mistake. All seem to agree that the fact that the software 
developed by ICOT was available only on proprietary machines diminished its impact. 

As for the future, everyone stressed that without a continued presence of ICOT, 
the research results produced by the project would vanish into thin air. One of the 
main functions ICOT should play is to make the software technology available on stock 
hardware, under stock operating systems (Unix), provide documentation and support 
for the software, and integrate the various changes and improvements the users of the 
software, who will have access to its source code, are bound to make. 

Every workshop participant got a collection of reports by ICOT visitors. Ogawa-
san showed me my 1982 report, which appears there. I must admit I read it with great 


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