1 Introduction 

This report summarizes my views of the Fifth Generation Project (FGCS) conducted at ICOT 
over the period of 1982-1992. My participation is somewhat unique because I was both an 
ICOT visitor in February 1987 and then a recipient of the first NSF-ICOT Visitors Program 
grant, from September 1987-September 1988. I joined the University of Tokyo, in the Research 
Center for Advanced Science and Technology (RCAST) at that time, with a visiting chair in 
Information Science donated by the CSK Corp. Thus over the period of 1986-1989 I had an 
"insider's view" of the FGCS Project. My area of research concerned performance evaluation 
of parallel logic programming paradigms [12, 15, 8, 11, 9, 10, 17], primarily working with M. 
Sato. I also worked on multiprocessor cache protocols with A. Goto and A. Matsumoto [3] and 
compile-time estimation of task granularity in concurrent languages [7, 13]. During my stay at 
ICOT I had the opportunity to begin writing a book describing then state-of-the-art approaches 
to parallelization of logic programs [14]. 

Furthermore, my collaboration with ICOT researchers continued after my return to the U.S. 
During that period, the primary research was in the area of parallel garbage collection (with A. 
Imai [5, 4, 6]) and continued shared interest in distributed parallel algorithms, specifically for 
the best path problem (with N. Ichiyoshi [16, 1, 2]). (I included a bibliography of my own work 
associated with ICOT in order to convey the impact and importance on my own line of research. 
Of course, ICOT members have published extensively and produced results in numerous areas.) 

My experience as a Stanford post-doctoral research associate, working full-time at ICOT 
in 1988, was very rewarding. I had previously worked at IBM Yorktown Heights (with T. 
Agerwala and D. DeGroot), and at SRI Menlo Park (with D. H. D. Warren), and the ICOT 
research environment and academic comraderie was on par with these institutions. Summaries 
of the FGCS Project successes and failures by most foreign researchers tend to categorize the 
abstract vision (of knowledge engineering and a focus on logic programming) as a great success 
and the lack of commercially competitive hardware as the main failure. I would like to comment 
on more subtle successes that fewer observers had a chance to evaluate. These successes, as 


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