Japan launches the Fifth Generation project
Japan's MITI funds a ten-year national programme to build parallel machines that reason in logic; the West panics into funding of its own.
what had to happen · 6 events back to 1943
Every event this one built on, transitively, in order. Direct influences are marked.
00 · One neuron · 1
I · Foundations · 5
In April 1982 Japan's Ministry of International Trade and Industry opened the Institute for New Generation Computer Technology, ICOT, with a ten-year budget that eventually reached about ¥54 billion, roughly $400 million. The goal was a new kind of computer: massively parallel, programmed in a logic language descended from Prolog, capable of holding conversations, translating languages and reasoning over vast knowledge bases. Kazuhiro Fuchi, its director, described machines that would make a million logical inferences a second.
The announcement had more effect abroad than at home. Edward Feigenbaum and Pamela McCorduck's 1983 book The Fifth Generation warned that the United States was about to lose the computing industry the way it had lost consumer electronics, and Congress listened. DARPA's Strategic Computing Initiative, Britain's Alvey programme and Europe's ESPRIT were all, in part, responses to ICOT.
The project produced good parallel hardware and a great deal of logic-programming research, but none of the intelligent machines it had promised, and when it closed in 1992 the world's press called it a failure. It had also, without meaning to, funded the last big investment in symbolic AI before the statistical era.
what it led to · 2 events downstream, through 1992
Built on it directly: