sary in an advanced research project. 

The research leaders of ICOT are scientists of very high calibre much respected by 
their international colleagues. Most of them have been with the project for its du-
ration and have provided continuity of direction. Most of the other ICOT staff have 
been working on three-year assignments from the companies. The resulting lack of 
long-term continuity of ICOT staff, and the fact, as I understand it, that ICOT could 
not hand-pick the majority of its staff, are additional handicaps to pursuing advanced 
research not shared by comparable institutions such as ECRC, MCC and SICS. 

Major Technical Achievements 

The FGCS project has produced many significant technical achievements. Some of 
the major accomplishments which are of particular interest to me and which I would 
highlight are the following. 

First, ICOT has achieved its foremost concrete objective of building a parallel infer-
ence machine with a performance exceeding 100 megalips. Given the state of the art at 
the time the project was announced, when Prolog performance was at best 40,000 lips 
and large-scale parallel machines hardly existed, this achievement is quite remarkable 
and should not be underestimated. Although KL1 lips are not quite as powerful as 
Prolog lips, ICOT's achievement still represents a leap forward by more than three 
orders of magnitude. 

On the language side, I consider GHC to be a most significant contribution. It 
embodies, in my opinion, the most elegant encapsulation of the committed-choice lan-
guage (CCL) concept, simplifying and clarifying what was introduced by Parlog and 
Concurrent Prolog. 

In its parallel implementations of KL1, ICOT has significantly advanced the imple-
mentation technology for CCLs. My own group has drawn on this work, and on the 
key idea of GHC, in our implementation of Andorra-I. 

Although I have some reservations about that ICOT has committed itself entirely 
to CCLs and the concurrent logic paradigm, it cannot be denied that ICOT's PIM 
machine and operating system PIMOS are a powerful demonstration of what is possi-
ble in terms of building a machine and operating system entirely based on a CCL. It 
strikes me as something of an heroic feat, akin to climbing Everest or putting a man 
on the Moon, which opens our minds to future possibilities while perhaps not bringing 
immediate economic benefit. 

As part of its programme for producing demonstrations of KL1 and PIM, ICOT 


					- 144 -