On the negative side 

Since 1985 there was a clear shift from dedicated hardware to general purpose hard-
ware. ICOT was not flexible enough, perhaps due to the overall project structure. 
A very valuable possible industrial output would have been setting standards for the 
design of general purpose RISC chip for symbolic languages. This might have been just 
adding tag support for conventional RISC chips, and/or support for multiprocessing. 
Another issue is the lack of active and incremental migration of ICOT's software to 
commercially available machines in general, and to machines belonging to the associ-
ated companies in particular. This is crucial for any commercial exploitation, and is a 
prerequisite for more eager adoption of new technology within the companies engaged 
in the project. 

Recommendations 

ICOT software should be ported to a wide class of commercially available machines 
in order to allow for adoption of the technology produced within the associated com-
panies and the wide research communities. 

Minimal extensions to existing standard hardware to efficiently support parallel 
symbolic computing should be identified, and reported to the associated companies to 
be taken into account when new generation of commercial hardware is designed by the 
associated companies. 

Conclusions 

The Fifth generation project has indeed been a very valuable project. From a 
Swedish perspective ICOT has succeeded in establishing close cooperation between 
Swedish and Japanese researchers both on the academic and industrial level. ICOT 
has also influenced the establishment of the Swedish Institute of Computer Science. 

The internal technical results, given the constraint of a fixed time period, and the 
temporary nature of its personnel, surpass expectation. However, it is clear 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 
parallel architecture prototypes. It is also of extreme importance to port the valu-
able software generated by the project to widely accessible general purpose machines, 
both parallel and sequential. This is necessary in order to disseminate the results of 
the project in the international research community, to stimulate the adoption of this 
new technology within the associated companies, and to create a basis for possible 
commercial exploitation. Experience from developing knowledge processing tools and 


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