Report
by Ehud Shapiro,
June, 1992.
interest, not remembering at all what I wrote there 10 years ago. Reading the report
caused me to change my presentation. I started by quoting the goals of the project,
as I saw them then: "[The Fifth Generation Project's] ultimate goal is to develop in-
tegrated systems --- both hardware and software --- suitable for the major computer
applications of the next decade, identified by the Japanese as 'Knowledge Information
Processing'. "
"In addition ... the project is expected to elevate Japan's prestige in the world. It
will refute accusations that Japan is only exploiting knowledge imported from abroad,
without contributing any of its own to benefit the rest of the world. Hence the project
aims at original research, and plans to make its results available to the international
community. "
In retrospect, I think that both of these goals --- realizing an integrated, innovate,
and useful system, and elevating Japan's in the world --- have been fully achieved.
MITI's recent decision to allow free distribution of software is consistent with the plan
of making the results available to the international community. However, I agree with
the other speakers in the workshop, that without continuing support from ICOT, that
software will simply die.
I agreed with some of the previous speakers, that the international impact of the
project was not as large as one hoped for in the beginning. I think all of us who believed
in the direction taken by the project, i.e. developing integrated parallel computer sys-
tems based on logic programming, hoped that by the end of the 10 years period the
superiority of the logic programming approach will be demonstrated beyond doubt,
and that commercial applications of this technology will be well on their way. Unfortu-
nately, this has not been the case. Although ICOT has reached its technological goals,
the applications it has developed were sufficient to demonstrate the practicality of the
approach, but not its conclusive superiority.
This can be partly attributed to the short period available for application develop-
ment, give the software and hardware development schedule. But, more importantly, I
think that this was the result of the applications being developed in an artificial setup.
I believe applications should be developed by people who need them, and in the context
where they are needed. The suitability of the software technology developed by ICOT
cannot be fully evaluated until such applications are attempted.
Therefore I made some concrete suggestions for the future direction of ICOT. Some
of them are in line with what is already planned. I suggest that ICOT now focus on
making its concurrent logic programming software technology widely available, and
actively encourage and support research and development groups who will use it in
real-life applications. Specifically, I suggest that ICOT will:
- 94 -