future computer research. When I have asked to identify what are the most important 
aspects of the FGCS Project and the way Japanese research is organized, I always refer 
to the putting together of the Plan as the most valuable part. I describe it as; bring-
ing together the leading experts in Japan, then gathering all the information available 
from the best people world-wide, collating this information, building a consensus on 
the future, and then distributing the resulting plan, especially to Japanese industry. 
The FGCS Plan is as relevant today as it was in 1982. During the past year I have been 
reading the NIPT or Real-World Computing documents and I have been struck by how 
similar they were to the FGCS Plan. In fact, if one took the FGCS Plan and changed 
all the references from Logic to Neural Networks the two plans would be almost the 
identical. 

It Is easy today to dismiss the impact of the FGCS Project saying that it was a 
mistake to base it solely on Logic and that some of the estimates for breakthroughs 
in Speech Processing were over ambitious, but, this is to ignore the wider impact that 
the FGCS Project has had particularly on software research in Japan and on the way 
governments' organize collaborative research world-wide. We must remember that at 
the time the decision was made to base the project on Logic, there were no other al-
ternative choice. For example, Neural Networks were a good seven years away. 

Therefore I remain convinced that the FGCS Project has been major success, and 
is a credit to the Japanese Government. 

                                                                16th June 1992 

Professor Philip C. Treleaven 
Department of Computer Science 
University College London 


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