The Fifth Generation Computer Systems project (FGCS) was an initiative by Japan's Ministry of International Trade and Industry, begun in 1982, to create a "fifth generation computer" (see history of computing hardware) which was supposed to perform much calculation using massive parallelism. It was to be the end result of a massive government/industry research project in Japan during the 1980s. It aimed to create an "epoch-making computer" with supercomputer-like performance and usable artificial intelligence capabilities. The Ministry of International Trade and Industry (通商産業省 Tsūsho-sangyō-shō or MITI) was the single most powerful agency in the Japanese government during the 1950s and 1960s. ... Year 1982 (MCMLXXXII) was a common year starting on Friday (link displays the 1982 Gregorian calendar). ... Computing hardware has been an important component of the process of calculation and computer data storage since it became useful for numerical values to be processed and shared. ... Massive parallelism is a term used in computer architecture and application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) design. ... For other uses, see Supercomputer (disambiguation). ... AI redirects here. ...

The term fifth generation was intended to convey the system as being a leap beyond existing machines. Computers using vacuum tubes were called the first generation; transistors and diodes, the second; integrated circuits, the third; and those using microprocessors, the fourth. Whereas previous computer generations had focused on increasing the number of logic elements in a single CPU, the fifth generation, it was widely believed at the time, would instead turn to massive numbers of CPUs for added performance. Structure of a vacuum tube diode Structure of a vacuum tube triode In electronics, a vacuum tube, electron tube, or (outside North America) thermionic valve or just valve, is a device used to amplify, switch or modify a signal by controlling the movement of electrons in an evacuated space. ... Assorted discrete transistors A transistor is a semiconductor device, commonly used as an amplifier or an electrically controlled switch. ... Closeup of the image below, showing the square shaped semiconductor crystal various semiconductor diodes, below a bridge rectifier Structure of a vacuum tube diode In electronics, a diode is a two-terminal component, almost always one that has electrical properties which vary depending on the direction of flow of charge... Integrated circuit of Atmel Diopsis 740 System on Chip showing memory blocks, logic and input/output pads around the periphery Microchips (EPROM memory) with a transparent window, showing the integrated circuit inside. ... A microprocessor incorporates most or all of the functions of a central processing unit (CPU) on a single integrated circuit (IC). ...

Opinions about its outcome are divided: Either it was a failure, or it was ahead of its time.

History

Background and design philosophy

Throughout these multiple generations since the 1980s, Japan had largely been a follower in terms of computing advancement, building computers following US and British leads. The Ministry for International Trade and Industry (MITI) decided to attempt to break out of this follow-the-leader pattern, and in the mid-1970s started looking, on a small scale, into the future of computing. They asked the Japan Information Processing Development Center (JIPDEC) to indicate a number of future directions, and in 1979 offered a three-year contract to carry out more in-depth studies along with industry and academia. It was during this period that the term "fifth-generation computer" started to be used.

The primary fields for investigation from this initial project were:

• Inference computer technologies for knowledge processing
• Computer technologies to process large-scale data bases and knowledge bases
• High performance workstations
• Distributed functional computer technologies
• Super-computers for scientific calculation

The project imagined a parallel processing computer running on top of massive databases (as opposed to a traditional filesystem) using a logic programming language to define and access the data. They envisioned building a prototype machine with performance between 100M and 1G LIPS, where a LIPS is a Logical Inference Per Second. At the time typical workstation machines were capable of about 100k LIPS. They proposed to build this machine over a ten year period, 3 years for initial R&D, 4 years for building various subsystems, and a final 3 years to complete a working prototype system. In 1982 the government decided to go ahead with the project, and established the Institute for New Generation Computer Technology (ICOT) through joint investment with various Japanese computer companies. Parallel processing is the ability of the brain to simultaneously process incoming stimuli. ... This article is principally about managing and structuring the collections of data held on computers. ... See Filing system for this term as it is used in libraries and offices In computing, a file system is a method for storing and organizing computer files and the data they contain to make it easy to find and access them. ... Logic programming (sometimes called logical programming) is programming that makes use of pattern-directed invocation of procedures from assertions and goals. ... Inference is the act or process of deriving a conclusion based solely on what one already knows. ...

Implementation

So ingrained was the belief that parallel computing was the future of all performance gains that the Fifth-Generation project generated a great deal of apprehension in the computer field. After having seen the Japanese take over the consumer electronics field during the 1970s and apparently doing the same in the automotive world during the 1980s, the Japanese in the 1980s had a reputation for invincibility. Soon parallel projects were set up in the US as the Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation (MCC), in England as Alvey, and in Europe as the European Strategic Program of Research in Information Technology (ESPRIT, as well as ECRC (European Computer Research Centre) in Munich, a collaboration between ICL in Britain, Bull in France, and Siemens in Germany. Consumer electronics is a term used to describe the category of electronic equipment intended for everyday use by people, the consumers. ... Car redirects here. ... The MCC headquarters building in Austin, Texas Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation (MCC) was the first, and is now one of the largest, United States computer industry research and development consortia. ... The Alvey Program was a British government sponsored research program in information technology that ran from 1983 to 1987. ... ESPRIT is an acronym for the European Strategic Program on Research in Information Technology of the European Union, run by the Directorate General for Industry of the European Commission. ...

Five running Parallel Inference Machines (PIM) were eventually produced: PIM/m, PIM/p, PIM/i, PIM/k, PIM/c. The project also produced applications to run on these systems, such as the parallel database management system Kappa, the legal reasoning system HELIC-II, and the automated theorem prover MGTP, as well as applications to Bioinformatics. A database management system (DBMS) is computer software designed for the purpose of managing databases based on a variety of data models. ... Automated theorem proving (currently the most important subfield of automated reasoning) is the proving of mathematical theorems by a computer program. ...

Failure

The FGCS Project did not meet with commercial success for reasons similar to the Lisp machine companies and Thinking Machines. The highly parallel computer architecture was eventually surpassed in speed by less specialized hardware (for example, Sun workstations and Intel x86 machines). The project did produce a new generation of promising Japanese researchers. But after the FGCS Project, MITI stopped funding large-scale computer research projects, and the research momentum developed by the FGCS Project dissipated. The original Lisp machine built by Greenblatt and Knight Lisp machines were general-purpose computers designed (usually through hardware support) to efficiently run Lisp as their main software language. ... Thinking Machines Corporation was a supercomputer manufacturer founded in Waltham, Massachusetts in 1982 by W. Daniel Hillis and Sheryl Handler to turn Hilliss doctoral work at MIT on massively parallel computing architectures into a commercial product called the Connection Machine. ... Sun Microsystems Logo Sun Microsystems (NASDAQ: SUNW) is a Silicon Valley-based computer, semiconductor and software manufacturer. ... Intel Corporation (NASDAQ: INTC, SEHK: 4335), founded in 1968 as Integrated Electronics Corporation, is an American multinational corporation that is best known for designing and manufacturing microprocessors and specialized integrated circuits. ... x86 or 80x86 is the generic name of a microprocessor architecture first developed and manufactured by Intel. ... The Ministry of International Trade and Industry (通商産業省 Tsūsho-sangyō-shō or MITI) was the single most powerful agency in the Japanese government during the 1950s and 1960s. ...

A primary problem was the choice of concurrent logic programming as the bridge between the parallel computer architecture and the use of logic as a knowledge representation and problem solving language for AI applications. This never happened cleanly; a number of languages were developed, all with their own limitations. In particular, the committed choice of concurrent logic programming interfered with the logical semantics of the languages.

Another problem was that existing CPU performance quickly pushed through the "obvious" barriers that experts perceived in the 1980s, and the value of parallel computing quickly dropped to the point where it was for some time used only in niche situations. Although a number of workstations of increasing capacity were designed and built over the project's lifespan, they generally found themselves soon outperformed by "off the shelf" units available commercially. Sun SPARCstation 1+, 25 MHz RISC processor from early 1990s A workstation, such as a Unix workstation, RISC workstation or engineering workstation, is a high-end desktop or deskside microcomputer designed for technical applications. ...

The project also suffered from being on the wrong side of the technology curve. During its lifespan, Apple Computer introduced the GUI to the masses; the internet enabled locally stored databases to become distributed; and even simple research projects provided better real-world results in data mining, Google being a good example. Moreover the project found that the promises of logic programming were largely negated by the use of committed choice. Apple Inc. ... GUI can refer to the following: GUI is short for graphical user interface, a term used to describe a type of interface in computing. ... This article is about the corporation. ... Logic programming (which might better be called logical programming by analogy with mathematical programming and linear programming) is, in its broadest sense, the use of mathematical logic for computer programming. ...

At the end of the ten year period the project had spent through over 50 billion yen^{[citation needed]} and was terminated without having met its goals. The workstations had no appeal in a market where single-CPU systems could outrun them, and the entire concept was overtaken by the Internet.

In spite of the possibility of considering the project a failure, many of the approaches envisioned in the Fifth-Generation project, such as logic programming distributed over massive knowledge-bases, are now being re-interpreted in current technologies. The Web Ontology Language (OWL) employs several layers of logic-based knowledge representation systems, while many flavors of parallel computing proliferate, including Multi-core (computing) at the low-end and Massively parallel processing at the high end. It can be argued that the Fifth-Generation project was aimed at solving a problem that was ahead of its time. The Web Ontology Language (OWL) is a language for defining and instantiating Web ontologies. ... Diagram of an Intel Core 2 dual core processor, with CPU-local Level 1 caches, and a shared, on-die Level 2 cache. ... Massively Parallel Processing is a term used in Computer Engineering. ...

Timeline

• 1982: the FGCS project begins and receives $450,000,000 worth of industry funding and an equal amount of government funding.
• 1985: the first FGCS hardware known as the Personal Sequential Inference Machine (PSI) and the first version of the Sequentual Inference Machine Programming Operating System (SIMPOS) operating system is released. SIMPOS is programmed in Kernel Language 0 (KL0), a concurrent Prolog-variant with object oriented extensions.
• 1987: a prototype of a truly parallel hardware called the Parallel Inference Machine (PIM) is built using several PSI:s connected in a network. The project receives funding for 5 more years. A new version of the kernel language Kernel Language 1 (KL1) which look very similar to "Flat GDC" (Flat Guarded Definite Clauses) is created, influenced by developments in Prolog. The operating system written in KL1 is renamed Parallel Inference Machine Operating System or PIMOS.

Year 1982 (MCMLXXXII) was a common year starting on Friday (link displays the 1982 Gregorian calendar). ... This article is about the year. ... Prolog is a logic programming language. ... An object is fundamental concept in object-oriented programming. ... This article is about the year 1987. ... KL1, or Kernel Language 1 is an experimental AND-parallel version of KL0 for the ICOT project. ...

References

• Edward A.Feigenbaum and Pamela McCorduck, The Fifth Generation: Artificial Intelligence and Japan's Computer Challenge to the World, Michael Joseph, 1983. ISBN 0-7181-2401-4
• Ehud Shapiro. The family of concurrent logic programming languages ACM Computing Surveys. September 1989.
• Carl Hewitt and Gul Agha. Guarded Horn clause languages: are they deductive and Logical? International Conference on Fifth Generation Computer Systems, Ohmsha 1988. Tokyo.
• Shunichi Uchida and Kazuhiro Fuchi Proceedings of the FGCS Project Evaluation Workshop Institute for New Generation Computer Technology (ICOT). 1992.

Edward Albert Feigenbaum (born January 20, 1936) is a computer scientist working in the field of artificial intelligence. ... Ehud Shapiro (born 1955) is a Jewish scientist in Israel who is developing a DNA computer. ... Carl E. Hewitt is an Associate Professor (Emeritus) in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). ...

External links

• What is FGCS Technologies? - The main page of the project. Includes pictures of prototype machines.
• Fifth Generation Computing Conference Report
• The fifth generation: Japan's computer challenge to the world- 1984 article from Creative Computing
• ICOT home page (now AITRG)
• ICOT Free Software
• FGCS museum
• KL1 to C compiler homepage
• Conference proceedings on FGCS