elsaesser%mwcamis@MITRE.ARPA.UUCP (06/11/87)
It seems ages ago that the 5th generation project was going to
reinvent AI in a Prolog "engine" that was to do 10 gazillion "
LIPS". Anyone know what happened? I mean, if you can make so many
"quality" cars (sans auto transmission, useful A/C, paint that can take
rain and sun, etc.), why can't you make a computer that runs an NP-complete
applications language in real time??? Semi-seriously, what is the status
of the 5th generation project, anyone got an update?
chris (elsaesser%mwcamis@mitre.arpa)
[See the June IEEE Spectrum, "Next-Generation Race Bogs Down", Karen
Fitzgerald and Raul Wallich, pp. 28-33, for a review. The
Japanese effort is doing well enough in its parallel architecture
development and is making some progress in "knowledge programming",
but has dropped VLSI technology and made little headway in AI and
knowledge representation. Competitive efforts in the U.S. and
Europe have also had the most success in hardware. The real question
now is whether the 5th-generation push has given Japan the kind of
computer-science infrastructure that it needs to compete and perhaps
pull out ahead in algorithm development. My guess is that it has not
(because the software part of the effort was too small). An interesting
sign of change, though, is the Japanese government's invitation to
Western universities to set up branches in Japan. I assume that
Japanese leaders will always come from Tyodai or Kyodai, but perhaps
computer scientists will be educated in a different tradition. -- KIL]chik@icot.jp (Chikayama Takashi) (07/15/87)
In article <8706111231.AA18169@mitre.arpa> elsaesser%mwcamis@MITRE.ARPA writes: >It seems ages ago that the 5th generation project was going to >reinvent AI in a Prolog "engine" that was to do 10 gazillion " >LIPS". Anyone know what happened? I mean, if you can make so many >"quality" cars (sans auto transmission, useful A/C, paint that can take >rain and sun, etc.), why can't you make a computer that runs an NP-complete >applications language in real time??? Semi-seriously, what is the status >of the 5th generation project, anyone got an update? Well, we are sorry not distributing enough information to the AI society. Most papers related to ICOT's research are distributed to the logic programming society but not to the AI world (I guess you know how poor propagandist Japanese are:-). Many are reported in: International Conference on Logic Programming IEEE Symposium on Logic Programming Please look into proceedings of these conferences. For about 10 gazillion LIPS computers: What our research of these 5 years revealed is that highly parallel hardware can never be practical without much software effort, including new concepts in programming languages. More stress is put upon software than in the original project plan. Indeed, VLSI technology is dropped off from the project. Our experience shows that VLSI technology is NOT the most difficult point in the way to realistic highly parallel computer systems. An efficient system with 256 processors may be built without changing the software at all. But for systems with 4096 processors, we need a drastic change. And this is what we need to achieve 10 gazillion LIPS. NOT that VLSI technology has become easier, but that we have found MORE difficult problems, unfortunately. Where are we? Well, one of our recent hardware achievement is the development of the PSI-II machine, which executes 400 KLIPS (much less than 10 gazillion, I guess :-). It is a sequential machine and will be used as element processors of our prototype parallel processor Multi-PSI V2 (with 64 PE's), whose hardware is scheduled to come up at the end of this year. If you are interested in our research, a survey by myself titled: "Parallel Inference System Researches in the FGCS Project" will be presented in the IEEE Symposium on Logic Programming, held at San Francisco during Aug 31-Sep 4, 1987. If you are more interested in our project, please join the FGCS'88 conference. It will be held in Tokyo during Nov 28-Dec 2, 1988. Takashi Chikayama