Laws%SRI-AI@sri-unix.UUCP (08/15/84)
The following summary is from a NYT article, Japan Appears To Falter
Attempting To Create New Computer, by Andrew Pollack.
Kazuhiro Fuchi, research director of the 5th generation project,
says that the project budget has been drastically cut back on goals
of vision, speech understanding, and natural language translation.
The core program -- including reasoning, understanding written language,
and intelligent programming -- has been preserved.
The first phase, development of a database machine and a sequential
reasoning engine, has been completed on schedule. Funding has been
cut by 50% for the second phase, including development of a parallel
machine and research in perception and man-machine interfaces. Project
officials claim that: it is only natural the original vague goals would
be narrowed; the original funding proposals were overly generous; and
several private companies are researching the cut problems on their
own, so there is little need for the institute to work on them.
Finding qualified researchers was more of a problem than budget
limitations anyway. ("I personally felt it was rather difficult to
spend 100 billion yen," Fuchi said.)
On the other hand, there will now be less opportunity for exploring
different approaches. The third phase may be jeapardized if dead
ends are encountered in the second phase.
The Japanese government is trying to reduce a large deficit by
eliminating spending increases in all areas except defense and foreign
aid. If no exception is made for advanced technology, the ministry
would have to make cuts elsewhere to increase the budget of the Fifth
Generation project or find new sources of revenue. The ministry has
continued to give the project favorable budget treatment, even though
the agency's overall budget for high technology has dropped 20 percent
during the last three years.
One way to increase the budget is to ask industry to provide money.
Eight computer companies are providing researchers to the project and
are building machines for it, but they are not eager to provide
speculative, long-term research funds. Fuchi also is concerned that
corporate funding would limit the project's freedom to pursue its own
goals.
The institute wants to increase its staff from 50 researchers to
100 next year. But artificial intelligence reseachers are rare in
Japan, and the companies are reluctant to part with more. "The
Fifth Generation will produce technology for the 1990s," said
one official of Fujitsu Ltd., Japan's largest computer company.
"But we need products for our customers before the 1990s."
-- Ken Laws