4. PhD generation - ICOT generated an abnormally high (compared to comparable research 
   organizations within Japan, which is a difficult comparison to make) percentage of PhDs 
   from work conducted. Furthermore, it generated several professors, going to most of the 
   major Japanese universities, as well as others. 

Complete analysis of these four points could take many pages, so I will only give my (un-
substantiated) opinions here. I think all these natural results of the "market forces" acting on 
young ICOT researchers are positive. Increased communication between engineers, managers, 
professors and students will lead to more rapid progress in developing basic research ideas into 
successful commercial products. The question remains in my mind as to whether a National 
Project of this magnitude is necessary to create these human networks each generation, or if this 
first network will propagate itself without help from another project? It is reasonable to assume 
a mixed success, i.e., the networks will weaken with age, but will remain in place. Thus in the 
future, it may not require such a grand-scale project to strengthen ties. For example, current 
ICOT graduates, understanding the importance of free and flexible discussion of results at na-
tional conferences, will increase the participation of the researchers in their care, thus enabling 
the next generation to form their own friendships and working relationships. 

3 About Technology 

I will exploit this opportunity to discuss the validity or commercialization of the processing tech-
nologies developed by ICOT, specifically the idea of building a special-purpose multiprocessor 
to execute a fine-grain concurrent language. This seems to be the main concern of the press, 
and perhaps the key point upon which ICOT is being evaluated. One could criticize ICOT 
for attempting to naively leapfrog "fourth generation" RISC-based microprocessor technologies, 
which continue yearly to grow in performance. Ten years ago, Japanese companies did not have 
experience developing microprocessor architectures, much less second-generation RISC designs 
(superscalar), nor MIMD multiprocessor designs. Building the various PIM machines gave the 
hardware manufactures some limited experience in microprocessor design, although presumably 
this experience could have been had with a more conventional target. 

On one level, however, the unique experience that was attained, i.e., that of fabricating 
tagged symbolic architectures, contains much of the structure needed to tackle the problem 
from the bottom-up, as being done by conventional multiprocessor vendors. It is not surprising 
that operating systems are now developing light-weight threads, and that languages such as 
object-oriented Smalltalk and tuple-based Linda form the cores of recent distributed processing 
efforts. My contention is that these efforts are climbing from the bottom-up, whereas ICOT 
had a top-down approach to the same problem (of massively parallel symbolic computation). 
Furthermore, because I know firsthand of the quick responsiveness of Japanese research and 
development in this area, I have little doubt that these two methods will be bridged. If the 
performance gap is bridged, the key question is who will be in the better position? 


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