Some Reflections on the Fifth Generation Project

Seif Haridi & Siwert Sundström
Swedish Institute of Computer Science

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both knowledge information processing and numeric computations. 

The Goals of the Project 

It is the understanding of the authors that the ICOT project was set up with the 
following combined goals: 

1. To develop the knowledge processing technology and the basic tools needed for 
   advanced applications that require both deductive and intensive symbolic process-
   ing capabilities. These applications were predicted to be increasingly in demand 
   during the nineties and early 21st Century. 

2. To exploit and develop parallel processing technology and highly parallel archi-
   tectures in order to meet the performance requirements expected for the above 
   class of applications. 

3. As the link or glue between the higher level knowledge-based applications and 
   the highly parallel machine at the lower level, an intermediate programming 
   language based on logic programming was to be developed. This language, on 
   one hand, would be flexible enough to implement the high level tools needed for 
   the knowledge intensive applications, as stated in point 1, and, on the other hand, 
   be suitable for exploiting the resources of parallel machines and making parallel 
   programming easy as stated in point 2. 

Needless to say the goals of the project at the time of its conception were very am-
bitious, since they required breakthroughs in many of the technological areas outlined 
above. However, that is not to say that they were not viable. In fact, with the current 
knowledge of the state of art, these goals seem achievable, and we certainly admire 
the courage of the project leaders to attack such challenging technological problems at 
such an early stage. 

Organisational Structure Tradeoffs 

The project leadership was given ten years to achieve these goals, and the majority 
of the staff were recruited from the Japanese computer industry on a temporary basis. 
Under these constraints, the ICOT project can be evaluated from two different per-
spectives, one w.r.t. its scientific output, and the other w.r.t. its industrial output. It 
is, however, important to notice that under the premises of the project, i.e fixed time 
and temporary personnel, the goals of maximising both the scientific and industrial 
outputs are largely incompatible and some compromises had to be made. 

Just to illustrate some of the trade-offs, here are some issues: 


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