General Impact 

The FGCS project had a major political impact from the time it was first an-
nounced. The originally described plan was rather broad and fuzzy, with some appar-
ently grandiose objectives, and its announcement generated a lot of hype. It was some 
time before Fuchi's clear and far-sighted vision of future computer systems, in which 
logic programming would provide the central link between parallel architectures and 
knowledge processing applications, became widely understood. Many international de-
velopments were stimulated by the perceived "threat" of the FGCS project, including 
Alvey in the U.K. and MCC in the U.S.A. Other international developments were more 
directly inspired by the scientific vision of the project, and included the setting up of 
institutes such as SICS in Sweden and ECRC in Europe which were very much overseas 
counterparts of ICOT with very similar research directions. 

Overall, the project has had a major scientific impact, in furthering knowledge 
throughout the world of how to build advanced computing systems. It certainly pro-
vided a tremendous boost to research in logic programming. In a real sense, FGCS 
has become an international research effort. This clearly has enhanced Japan's inter-
national prestige. The project has also led to Japanese researchers becoming far more 
"plugged in" to the international research community than they were at the time of 
the project's announcement. A further general benefit of the project to Japan must 
surely be the transfer to Japanese industry of research ethos and experience, provided 
by staff returning to their home companies after their three-year assignments to ICOT. 

Organisational Issues 

The project appears to have been handicapped, in tackling its very ambitious re-
search goals, by being set in a framework more suited to an industrial development 
project. Ten years of basic research cannot be tightly laid down in advance, as much 
of ICOT's programme seems to have been, with its predetermined duration, phases, 
milestones and hardware deliverables. The inflexibility of ICOT's programme seems to 
have prevented the possibility of changes of direction and reevaluation that are neces-


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