Some Reflections on the Fifth Generation Project
Seif Haridi & Siwert Sundström
Swedish Institute of Computer Science
This report represents the personal opinions of the authors.
Summary
The Fifth generation project has been a very valuable project. ICOT has served
as a source of inspiration to international research in the area. It is not unfair to
say that many research programmes and institutes were conceived in reaction to the
establishment of ICOT. ICOT has made a solid progress in applying parallel process-
ing to symbolic computing and knowledge information processing. Many of the ideas
and concepts developed by ICOT have been further developed and modified at other
research centers. We believe that ICOT has contributed to and affected other research
more than outside research has affected and influenced ICOT. This may have been
inevitable due to the fixed nature of ICOT's long-term plan. Therefore, we must also
look outside ICOT to judge the results of the project.
The internal technical results, given the constraint of a fixed time period, and the
temporary nature of its personnel, surpass expectations. However, we find that at this
stage the project remains unfinished.
In order to fully achieve the goals of the project, research should continue on im-
provement of the software generated by the project and on careful evaluation of the
software and the parallel architecture prototypes. It is also of extreme importance to
port the valuable software generated by the project to widely accessible general pur-
pose machines, both parallel and sequential. This is necessary in order to disseminate
the results of the project to the international research community and to create a basis
for possible commercial exploitation. Experience from developing knowledge process-
ing tools and databases has to be documented and fed back to improve the design of
KL1. In particular, it seems that there is a need to improve the process communica-
tion abilities of KL1. There is also a need to incorporate recent research results on
integrating the programming paradigms of Prolog into the language as shown in the
Andorra family of languages. This is vital to facilitate the development of knowledge
processing tools. Finally there is a need for research on software tools that integrate
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