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Japan's fifth generation computer project
JAPAN’S FIFTH GENERATION COMPUTER PROJECT Rex Malik
The Japanese Fifth Generation project is aimed at increasing computing power by around three orders of magnitude over 15 years. Motives are political and social as well as commercial. The Japanese have sought international cooperation in this attempt to beat IBM (in particular) by ignoring compatibility with existing systems. Although there is not even an embryonic Vth generation system yet, final success looks likely. One goal is to be able to process knowledge (rather than data), in a user-friendly manner. Kcywuords:computer
technology;
Japan;
Fifth Generation
computers
IT IS HIGHLY UNLIKELY by now that there is anyone left with a professional interest in computing and its future who has not heard of Japan’s Vth Generation project. However, unless they have taken the trouble to read the Japanese literature (only the key outline documents have been translated into English), it is more than probable that they lack a clear understanding ofwhat the Vth Generation project is, the rationale which led to it, and why there should be the immense foreign interest displayed in it. For the foreign interest is massive. Britain is arranging its own project in turn, also referred to as the Vth Generation project, and the Japanese project has galvanized technological opinion in both France and the USA to try to mount projects with similar, if not quite as ambitious aims, though the three are using different mechanisms to mount these projects. However, whatever means they choose, the three countries are all committed to spend what are likely to be immense sums over the next ten or so years, at least, trying to match the Japanese effort. Indeed, it becomes apparent that what the Japanese have done is to set the computer technology development agenda for the next decade. Whatever else it may be, it is a remarkable state of affairs for a project which currently consists oflittle more than a handful ofmen, a three year budget from the spring of 1982 of less than C25 million, and voluminous paper plans. For not one of the systems within the Vth Generation as yet exists, even in Rex .\lalik is an independant computerjournalist/writer, \Ve thank Sperry for brin$ng author and publisher ltir the contents ol‘this amcle).
FUTURES June 1983
of 107 North End Road, London N\V I1 7T.\, UK. together (although the company have no responsibilit)
OOl S-3287/83/030205-06$03.00
0 1963 Butterworth 8 Co (Publishers) Ltd
embryonic form. What then is Japan’s Vth Generation, and why should there have been this immense, and intense, foreign reaction to it? How indeed is it that a project at this stage of development should already have had such a major impact on the future direction of the technology?
The politics of a reputation Ft’hy should the Japanese have allowed the rest of the world to find out so much about a project most of which is still set in the future, a project which, when it succeeds (I originally wrote if, but crossed it out) will transform computing technology and bring immense commercial advantages to its developers? It all began in the mid to late seventies with a feeling in Japan that they had had enough of the accusation that they were the world’s best copyists, but were not originally inventive. This is true in one sense: initial ideas leading to new types of products are few in Japan. However it is not true in another sense. In many technologies, the initial idea, while being critical, is yet only a few per cent of‘ the totality which will have to appear somehow if a technology is to be brought to maturity. The Japanese have been weak at the first, but usually very good at the second. The Japanese understand this, and feel that they should be able to manage the lOO%, not just the 90 odd per cent. True to Japanese habit, when a consensus emerged that all this needed tackling, a study was mounted, concerned with the direction in which computing might be made to go, and what would be required to make it go in that direction. Local internal politics were to play a part in the way decisions were arriv.ed at. The individual studies that led to the Vth Generation were mounted under MITI’s auspices at its Electrotechnical Laboratory, the ETL, now at the science city of Tsukuba; the initial programme on the V’th Generation itself was carried out under the chairmanship of Professor Tohru hloto Oka of Tokyo University. SIITI is only one of two digital technology national ‘forcing powers’ (which is the best way to think of them) in Japan. hlIT1 apart, the most comprehensive, wideranging, and concerted, long-term research which was related to computing was being done by the NTT, the Japanese telephone authority, and was, as might be expected, heavily communications biased. Though theoretically both the Ministry of Posts and Communications (under which the lXTT comes) and hIIT are meant, in their roles ofencouraging R&D, to come under the Science and Technology Agency (which in turn reports directly to the Prime Minister through a council), the competition between them has gone on for many years and till recently showed little signs of abating. The NTT line in this case, however, has been of the ‘if you can’t beat them, join them’ kind. Key NTT researchers are now deeply immersed with the V.th Generation project.
The search for allies It was decided early on that the project was so ambitious that the rest of- the computing world should be invited to join in; early statements talked of mounting an international attack on the issues being raised. hlIT1 might be FUTURES June 1983
Japan’s F$h
Generation computerproject
1207
concerned with a Japanese demonstration of virility, but it was soon realized that the project was ambitious in the extreme. Besides which, the project was also seen as an attack on the market dominance of IBM, and it seems to have been thought that others might be prepared to join in: that the fear ofJapan would be outweighed by the fear of IBM. All this resulted in the Tokyo conference of October 1981, with delegations from the UK, France, the USA and other industrialized countries. The Japanese aim at this time was to outline the dimensions of the Vth Generation project as they had thought it through, and begin what they hoped would be a process of international collaboration. What they achieved instead was to scare almost all the other participants, those who had ambitions of either being or remaining competitors against an electronic digital Japan. Though soon after the conference the Japanesegovernment officially made proposals for others to take part in the project proper, notably to France and the UK, they have not been taken up. The reasons have much to do with culture and with methodology. The Japanese methodology involved joint cooperative research followed by intensive individual company product development, followed in turn by intensive competition on the market place. This might work well in Japan, but there was no such tradition elsewhere. Add to this the lack of international mechanisms and experience in working together this way, and one finds that, while as I write [April 19831, no one has formally taken up the Japanese offer to participate, no one has formally rejected it either.
The market gap The Japanese begin by recognizing that current computer systems are not good at processing knowledge, as distinct from data, and that they are even weaker at supporting human interaction, unless the user is willing to devote considerable time to learning often quite complex routines and processes; computers in the main are unforgiving. The aim then is to produce systems which have reverse characteristics systems which do these things well, routinely, and cheaply. We could no doubt all do with such systems, but what is the urgency? The Japanese would say that they are going down this route for social ends. The Japanese elite has a view ofa near future in which Japan has a rapidly ageing population, faces a skills shortage, and continues to have an almost total dependence on imported natural resources. What Japan seeks is to reduce that import dependence as much as possible. This is not a new policy; Japanese have for some years been saying that their future is intimately tied to the knowledge-intensive and knowledge-driven industries. Social ends also happen to be commercial ends, of course; Japan has to live. But this is not all. I have an impression that the view among the Japanese elite is that the computer is central to their vision of the future society, and ofthe future of society. But they face a problem: when they look at the world market, it is dominated by a view of computing which emanates primarily from the activities ofone company, America’s IBM. It is an IMB-compatible world out there, and the chances ofJapan making a serious dent in it (in less than a real FUTURES June 1983
208
Japan’s Fiflh Generationcompukrproject
generation) by following IBM-doing a ‘me too’ but better and/or cheaperare minimal. So what the Japanese have chosen is to gamble that computing is in reality so much larger than the IBM view of the world, that they reduce IBM and its ilk to a subset: the computing systems they seek to develop should transcend that line of technology. (In the process, of course, they also reduce the importance of IBM’s competitors-Sperry Univac, Burroughs, NCR, ICL, CII HB, DEC, Data General, Wang and the rest.) As one cynical foreigner observed to me, the Japanese attitude seems to be: if you can’t join them, beat them. This is high ambition indeed. And how do you beat them? You do so by changing the game, which may not present the problems one might think it would. This is for one reason. The needs of compatability with the past are now such in most computing R&D that they cause much work which would otherwise be unnecessary, much expenditure, and a lot of time. It was expressed to me differently in Tokyo last year when one of the key hardware architects of the Vth Generation, Dr Uchida of ICOT (the Institute for New Generation Computer Technology) said smilingly that it was pleasant to be able to start to devise systems “without having to worry about compatability”. The Japanese are aiming to humanize computing, to turn it into an almost plain language control technology. The dream is an old one; we are back indeed with the Turing test, in which it should initially be difficult to distinguish whether one is talking to a specialist human or a specialist machine. For practical purposes one can think of it as taking the digital out of the human interface and putting back something analogous to analog. They are intending to build some quite specific systems in eight to ten years time, but to produce them within a generalized framework; creating that framework needs intensive research across the technology. Such a generalized system is not easily realizable and it will not come early-but that is not the Japanese aim in any case. Initially they hope to produce specific systems of two types. One is a machine capable of carrying out multi-language machine translation, with an initial target ofa 100 000 word vocabulary, a system which can handle translations with at least 90% accuracy, and at a cost of around one-third of that required for manual translation. The other is the expert system, a system which works on specific problems carrying inbuilt knowledge about the particular expertise and the rules (known as inference rules) which enable it to give an ‘expert’judgement. Here they are talking in terms ofa target system carrying 10 000 inference rules-which is a jump of at least an order of magnitude over what is practicable today. Elements
in the technology
The Japanese do not believe that such systems can be built out of the serial architecture of computers as we have them today, the Von Neumann origin architecture. In this they are not alone; such views are now common in computing R&D labs the world over. Where they are alone is in the concerted attack they are proposing to mount on the problem of changing the technology. This has been well caught in a UK study done for the government-supported Science and Engineering Research Council, which has not yet been made FUTURES June 1963
Japan’s Fiflh Generation computer
public,
project
209
but from which the following passage is taken.
The Japanese view their proposed fifth generation computer systems as representing a unification of a number of currently separate areas of research: knowledge based high level programming languages, desystems, human oriented input/output, centralized computing, and VLSI technology. What the Fifth Generation Project involves is a menu of research themes on knowledge engineering applications (intelligent systems with their knowledge bases and inference mechanisms), facilities for human oriented input/output (such as speech I/O and image I/O), high level logic
programming languages (taking PROLOG as the starting point), decentralized logic computer architectures (based on data flow organizations), and exploiting the latest VLSI technology.
It is a revealing list. The Japanese have swept the world’s literature, sorted out the approaches that seem to offer promise, and are pursuing them. Revealing? PROLOG originates from France and the UK, Dataflow from work in the UK, France and the USA. The Japanese even here cannot point to any major Japanese ideas, though one should not underestimate the research contribution of Japan in VLSI, which is already massive. That it does not as yet receive the credit due to it has more to do with the Japanese language and Japanee academic publishing habits, as well as the lack of interest displayed by foreigners in the Japanese literature. The USSR, though well behind the west, gets covered much more intensively in the literature on computing generally, though that is slowly changing. What happened next? ICOT opened its doors in the early summer of 1982, with the aim ofstarting development. The team is initially 40, most ofwhom are young and in turn owe little to past practice. Much of the detailed research is being done by specialists in the major laboratories and the major electronic companies, with ICOT having a design and coordinating role. Its own research is initially primarily aimed at creating a very fast PROLOG engine which it can then use as a test bed for development of the Vth Generation proper. These systems will then be used as personal work stations. At the same time, they are working on the development of a successor to PROLOG, which will be the ‘kernel language’. The point about PROLOG is that as yet it is a unique language: it is based on the predicate calculus. What the Japanese are seeking to do is to extend and widen it as the basis of an architecture. But to do that with any assumed generality, they need extremely fast and powerful processors. They seem to believe that to achieve their aims, they need to create systems of 100 to 1 OOOM LIPS capability. Given that one LIP is 100 to 1000 logical inferences a second, we are talking of systems in the 1990s of 100 to 1000 times the power of a Cray or a CDC 205 ( currently the most powerful systems on the planet). This is a jump indeed: three orders of magnitude within fifteen years, within a technology which has hitherto showed a tendency to change by one order of magnitude within a roughly similar period.
Will they pull it ofl? Is the rest of the world getting into a bate too early, before it is possible to make any sensible form ofjudgment? Or should it be worried from the competitive FUTURES June 1983
‘2 IO Japan’s Fifth Generationcomputerproject
angle iffrom no other? It must be said that whoever it was in Japan who thought up the name, ‘The Fifth Generation’, should, when the time comes, be retired with full and copious honours, even ifthe project turns out to be a disaster. The choice of name was indeed inspired for, though the Japanese are proposing to break from the conventional approach which sees one technology generation succeeding another, the notion it conveyed to the rest of the world was that the next generation would see Japan as a competitor on the world scene. The rest of the world has recently begun to feel Japanese pressure at the components level, it is now beginning to be felt seriously at the peripherals level-and here were the Japanese effectively saying that, in the nineties, they would be a full fledged competitor at the systems level. (I expect them to be competitors at this level long before the Vth Generation comes along; when it does, the competition becomes really serious.) Supposing the Japanese succeed, what difference will it make to the evolution of computing? I see very little in the Japanese targets which has not already been envisaged; what they are proposing to do is to make it all happen much earlier than would otherwise have been the case. Indeed, one can say that the! have succeeded in transferring some parts offuture computing from the pages of science fiction to those ofscience fact. In this sense, they ha\,e already sewed us \‘ery well. Is it all achievable? ‘:Ul’, I am not sure; ‘much’, I am. I have a suspicion, a gut leeling which comes from exposure to computing science for over a quarter of a century, that it may well turn out that the problems the-Japanese are tackling are susceptible to a concerted assault on a much smaller scale than anyone has hitherto thought. ;!nd I have a suspicion that we shall know whether I am right quite early on; if not in 1984. then 1985.
FUTURES June 1983
The Japanese Fifth Generation project is aimed at increasing computing power by around three orders of magnitude over 15 years. Motives are political and social as well as commercial. The Japanese have sought international cooperation in this attempt to beat IBM (in particular) by ignoring compatibility with existing systems. Although there is not even an embryonic Vth generation system yet, final success looks likely. One goal is to be able to process knowledge (rather than data), in a user-friendly manner. Kcywuords:computer
technology;
Japan;
Fifth Generation
computers
IT IS HIGHLY UNLIKELY by now that there is anyone left with a professional interest in computing and its future who has not heard of Japan’s Vth Generation project. However, unless they have taken the trouble to read the Japanese literature (only the key outline documents have been translated into English), it is more than probable that they lack a clear understanding ofwhat the Vth Generation project is, the rationale which led to it, and why there should be the immense foreign interest displayed in it. For the foreign interest is massive. Britain is arranging its own project in turn, also referred to as the Vth Generation project, and the Japanese project has galvanized technological opinion in both France and the USA to try to mount projects with similar, if not quite as ambitious aims, though the three are using different mechanisms to mount these projects. However, whatever means they choose, the three countries are all committed to spend what are likely to be immense sums over the next ten or so years, at least, trying to match the Japanese effort. Indeed, it becomes apparent that what the Japanese have done is to set the computer technology development agenda for the next decade. Whatever else it may be, it is a remarkable state of affairs for a project which currently consists oflittle more than a handful ofmen, a three year budget from the spring of 1982 of less than C25 million, and voluminous paper plans. For not one of the systems within the Vth Generation as yet exists, even in Rex .\lalik is an independant computerjournalist/writer, \Ve thank Sperry for brin$ng author and publisher ltir the contents ol‘this amcle).
FUTURES June 1983
of 107 North End Road, London N\V I1 7T.\, UK. together (although the company have no responsibilit)
OOl S-3287/83/030205-06$03.00
0 1963 Butterworth 8 Co (Publishers) Ltd
embryonic form. What then is Japan’s Vth Generation, and why should there have been this immense, and intense, foreign reaction to it? How indeed is it that a project at this stage of development should already have had such a major impact on the future direction of the technology?
The politics of a reputation Ft’hy should the Japanese have allowed the rest of the world to find out so much about a project most of which is still set in the future, a project which, when it succeeds (I originally wrote if, but crossed it out) will transform computing technology and bring immense commercial advantages to its developers? It all began in the mid to late seventies with a feeling in Japan that they had had enough of the accusation that they were the world’s best copyists, but were not originally inventive. This is true in one sense: initial ideas leading to new types of products are few in Japan. However it is not true in another sense. In many technologies, the initial idea, while being critical, is yet only a few per cent of‘ the totality which will have to appear somehow if a technology is to be brought to maturity. The Japanese have been weak at the first, but usually very good at the second. The Japanese understand this, and feel that they should be able to manage the lOO%, not just the 90 odd per cent. True to Japanese habit, when a consensus emerged that all this needed tackling, a study was mounted, concerned with the direction in which computing might be made to go, and what would be required to make it go in that direction. Local internal politics were to play a part in the way decisions were arriv.ed at. The individual studies that led to the Vth Generation were mounted under MITI’s auspices at its Electrotechnical Laboratory, the ETL, now at the science city of Tsukuba; the initial programme on the V’th Generation itself was carried out under the chairmanship of Professor Tohru hloto Oka of Tokyo University. SIITI is only one of two digital technology national ‘forcing powers’ (which is the best way to think of them) in Japan. hlIT1 apart, the most comprehensive, wideranging, and concerted, long-term research which was related to computing was being done by the NTT, the Japanese telephone authority, and was, as might be expected, heavily communications biased. Though theoretically both the Ministry of Posts and Communications (under which the lXTT comes) and hIIT are meant, in their roles ofencouraging R&D, to come under the Science and Technology Agency (which in turn reports directly to the Prime Minister through a council), the competition between them has gone on for many years and till recently showed little signs of abating. The NTT line in this case, however, has been of the ‘if you can’t beat them, join them’ kind. Key NTT researchers are now deeply immersed with the V.th Generation project.
The search for allies It was decided early on that the project was so ambitious that the rest of- the computing world should be invited to join in; early statements talked of mounting an international attack on the issues being raised. hlIT1 might be FUTURES June 1983
Japan’s F$h
Generation computerproject
1207
concerned with a Japanese demonstration of virility, but it was soon realized that the project was ambitious in the extreme. Besides which, the project was also seen as an attack on the market dominance of IBM, and it seems to have been thought that others might be prepared to join in: that the fear ofJapan would be outweighed by the fear of IBM. All this resulted in the Tokyo conference of October 1981, with delegations from the UK, France, the USA and other industrialized countries. The Japanese aim at this time was to outline the dimensions of the Vth Generation project as they had thought it through, and begin what they hoped would be a process of international collaboration. What they achieved instead was to scare almost all the other participants, those who had ambitions of either being or remaining competitors against an electronic digital Japan. Though soon after the conference the Japanesegovernment officially made proposals for others to take part in the project proper, notably to France and the UK, they have not been taken up. The reasons have much to do with culture and with methodology. The Japanese methodology involved joint cooperative research followed by intensive individual company product development, followed in turn by intensive competition on the market place. This might work well in Japan, but there was no such tradition elsewhere. Add to this the lack of international mechanisms and experience in working together this way, and one finds that, while as I write [April 19831, no one has formally taken up the Japanese offer to participate, no one has formally rejected it either.
The market gap The Japanese begin by recognizing that current computer systems are not good at processing knowledge, as distinct from data, and that they are even weaker at supporting human interaction, unless the user is willing to devote considerable time to learning often quite complex routines and processes; computers in the main are unforgiving. The aim then is to produce systems which have reverse characteristics systems which do these things well, routinely, and cheaply. We could no doubt all do with such systems, but what is the urgency? The Japanese would say that they are going down this route for social ends. The Japanese elite has a view ofa near future in which Japan has a rapidly ageing population, faces a skills shortage, and continues to have an almost total dependence on imported natural resources. What Japan seeks is to reduce that import dependence as much as possible. This is not a new policy; Japanese have for some years been saying that their future is intimately tied to the knowledge-intensive and knowledge-driven industries. Social ends also happen to be commercial ends, of course; Japan has to live. But this is not all. I have an impression that the view among the Japanese elite is that the computer is central to their vision of the future society, and ofthe future of society. But they face a problem: when they look at the world market, it is dominated by a view of computing which emanates primarily from the activities ofone company, America’s IBM. It is an IMB-compatible world out there, and the chances ofJapan making a serious dent in it (in less than a real FUTURES June 1983
208
Japan’s Fiflh Generationcompukrproject
generation) by following IBM-doing a ‘me too’ but better and/or cheaperare minimal. So what the Japanese have chosen is to gamble that computing is in reality so much larger than the IBM view of the world, that they reduce IBM and its ilk to a subset: the computing systems they seek to develop should transcend that line of technology. (In the process, of course, they also reduce the importance of IBM’s competitors-Sperry Univac, Burroughs, NCR, ICL, CII HB, DEC, Data General, Wang and the rest.) As one cynical foreigner observed to me, the Japanese attitude seems to be: if you can’t join them, beat them. This is high ambition indeed. And how do you beat them? You do so by changing the game, which may not present the problems one might think it would. This is for one reason. The needs of compatability with the past are now such in most computing R&D that they cause much work which would otherwise be unnecessary, much expenditure, and a lot of time. It was expressed to me differently in Tokyo last year when one of the key hardware architects of the Vth Generation, Dr Uchida of ICOT (the Institute for New Generation Computer Technology) said smilingly that it was pleasant to be able to start to devise systems “without having to worry about compatability”. The Japanese are aiming to humanize computing, to turn it into an almost plain language control technology. The dream is an old one; we are back indeed with the Turing test, in which it should initially be difficult to distinguish whether one is talking to a specialist human or a specialist machine. For practical purposes one can think of it as taking the digital out of the human interface and putting back something analogous to analog. They are intending to build some quite specific systems in eight to ten years time, but to produce them within a generalized framework; creating that framework needs intensive research across the technology. Such a generalized system is not easily realizable and it will not come early-but that is not the Japanese aim in any case. Initially they hope to produce specific systems of two types. One is a machine capable of carrying out multi-language machine translation, with an initial target ofa 100 000 word vocabulary, a system which can handle translations with at least 90% accuracy, and at a cost of around one-third of that required for manual translation. The other is the expert system, a system which works on specific problems carrying inbuilt knowledge about the particular expertise and the rules (known as inference rules) which enable it to give an ‘expert’judgement. Here they are talking in terms ofa target system carrying 10 000 inference rules-which is a jump of at least an order of magnitude over what is practicable today. Elements
in the technology
The Japanese do not believe that such systems can be built out of the serial architecture of computers as we have them today, the Von Neumann origin architecture. In this they are not alone; such views are now common in computing R&D labs the world over. Where they are alone is in the concerted attack they are proposing to mount on the problem of changing the technology. This has been well caught in a UK study done for the government-supported Science and Engineering Research Council, which has not yet been made FUTURES June 1963
Japan’s Fiflh Generation computer
public,
project
209
but from which the following passage is taken.
The Japanese view their proposed fifth generation computer systems as representing a unification of a number of currently separate areas of research: knowledge based high level programming languages, desystems, human oriented input/output, centralized computing, and VLSI technology. What the Fifth Generation Project involves is a menu of research themes on knowledge engineering applications (intelligent systems with their knowledge bases and inference mechanisms), facilities for human oriented input/output (such as speech I/O and image I/O), high level logic
programming languages (taking PROLOG as the starting point), decentralized logic computer architectures (based on data flow organizations), and exploiting the latest VLSI technology.
It is a revealing list. The Japanese have swept the world’s literature, sorted out the approaches that seem to offer promise, and are pursuing them. Revealing? PROLOG originates from France and the UK, Dataflow from work in the UK, France and the USA. The Japanese even here cannot point to any major Japanese ideas, though one should not underestimate the research contribution of Japan in VLSI, which is already massive. That it does not as yet receive the credit due to it has more to do with the Japanese language and Japanee academic publishing habits, as well as the lack of interest displayed by foreigners in the Japanese literature. The USSR, though well behind the west, gets covered much more intensively in the literature on computing generally, though that is slowly changing. What happened next? ICOT opened its doors in the early summer of 1982, with the aim ofstarting development. The team is initially 40, most ofwhom are young and in turn owe little to past practice. Much of the detailed research is being done by specialists in the major laboratories and the major electronic companies, with ICOT having a design and coordinating role. Its own research is initially primarily aimed at creating a very fast PROLOG engine which it can then use as a test bed for development of the Vth Generation proper. These systems will then be used as personal work stations. At the same time, they are working on the development of a successor to PROLOG, which will be the ‘kernel language’. The point about PROLOG is that as yet it is a unique language: it is based on the predicate calculus. What the Japanese are seeking to do is to extend and widen it as the basis of an architecture. But to do that with any assumed generality, they need extremely fast and powerful processors. They seem to believe that to achieve their aims, they need to create systems of 100 to 1 OOOM LIPS capability. Given that one LIP is 100 to 1000 logical inferences a second, we are talking of systems in the 1990s of 100 to 1000 times the power of a Cray or a CDC 205 ( currently the most powerful systems on the planet). This is a jump indeed: three orders of magnitude within fifteen years, within a technology which has hitherto showed a tendency to change by one order of magnitude within a roughly similar period.
Will they pull it ofl? Is the rest of the world getting into a bate too early, before it is possible to make any sensible form ofjudgment? Or should it be worried from the competitive FUTURES June 1983
‘2 IO Japan’s Fifth Generationcomputerproject
angle iffrom no other? It must be said that whoever it was in Japan who thought up the name, ‘The Fifth Generation’, should, when the time comes, be retired with full and copious honours, even ifthe project turns out to be a disaster. The choice of name was indeed inspired for, though the Japanese are proposing to break from the conventional approach which sees one technology generation succeeding another, the notion it conveyed to the rest of the world was that the next generation would see Japan as a competitor on the world scene. The rest of the world has recently begun to feel Japanese pressure at the components level, it is now beginning to be felt seriously at the peripherals level-and here were the Japanese effectively saying that, in the nineties, they would be a full fledged competitor at the systems level. (I expect them to be competitors at this level long before the Vth Generation comes along; when it does, the competition becomes really serious.) Supposing the Japanese succeed, what difference will it make to the evolution of computing? I see very little in the Japanese targets which has not already been envisaged; what they are proposing to do is to make it all happen much earlier than would otherwise have been the case. Indeed, one can say that the! have succeeded in transferring some parts offuture computing from the pages of science fiction to those ofscience fact. In this sense, they ha\,e already sewed us \‘ery well. Is it all achievable? ‘:Ul’, I am not sure; ‘much’, I am. I have a suspicion, a gut leeling which comes from exposure to computing science for over a quarter of a century, that it may well turn out that the problems the-Japanese are tackling are susceptible to a concerted assault on a much smaller scale than anyone has hitherto thought. ;!nd I have a suspicion that we shall know whether I am right quite early on; if not in 1984. then 1985.
FUTURES June 1983