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The Fifth-Generation Computer was to be the end result of a massive
government/industry research project in Japan during the 1980s, which aimed
to create an "epoch-making computer" that would leapfrog more evolutionary
designs by using the Prolog programming language to create a desktop system
with supercomputer-like performance and usable artificial intelligence
capabilities.
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, ICs 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.
Throughout these multiple generations since the 1950s, Japan had largely
been a follower in terms of computing advancement, building computers
following US and British leads. The Ministry of 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 file system, using a logic programming
language to 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.
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 computing field. After having seen the Japanese take
over the consumer electronics field during the 1970s and apparently doing
the same in the automotive world, 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).
Over the next ten years the Fifth-Generation project ran into one
difficulty after another. A primary problem was that their selected
language, Prolog, did not support concurrency, and therefore they had to
develop their own language for their multi-CPU goals. This never happened
cleanly, and in fact a number of languages were developed, all with their
own limitations. Another problem was that existing CPU performance quickly
pushed through the "obvious" barriers that everyone believed existed in the
1970s, and the value of parallel computing quickly dropped to the point
where it is today 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.
The Fifth-Generation Computer was constantly on the wrong side of
technology curve in software as well. Over the period of it's lifespan Apple
Computer introduced the GUI to the masses, the internet made locally-stored
large databases a thing of the past, and even simple research projects
constantly provided better real-world results in data mining, Google being a
good example. Moreover the project found that the promises of logic
programmer were largely illusitory, and they ran into the same sorts of
limitations that earlier artificial intelligence researchers had, albeit at
a different scale. Repeated attempts to make the system work after changing
one language feature or another simply moved the point at which the computer
suddenly seemed stupid. In fact it can be said that the project "missed the
point" as a whole. It was during this time that the computer industry moved
from hardware to software as a primary focus. The Fifth Generation project
never made a clean separation, feeling that, as it was in the 1970s,
hardware and software were inevitably mixed.
By any measure the project was an abject failure. At the end of the ten
year period they had burned through over 50 billion yen and the program was
terminated without having met its goals. The workstations had no appeal in a
market where single-CPU systems could outrun them, the software systems
never worked, and the entire concept was then made obsolete by the internet.
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