Fifth Generation Computer Systems
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 system with usable artificial inteligence capabilities.
The word "generation" is used to express progress in the computer field, especially in terms of hardware. Computers using vacuum tubes were called the first generation, those based on transistors and diodes the second generation, those adopting ICs the third generation, those built using LSIs the third and a half generation, and those using microprocessors the fourth. Throughout these multiple generations Japan had largely been a follower, 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, academia, and government. 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 databases, as opposed to a filesystem, using a logic programming language (Prolog) to access the data. The envisioned building a prototype machine with performance between 100M LIPS and 1G LIPS, where a LIPS is a Logical Inference Per Second. At the time 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.
Over the next ten years the 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. Another is that CPU performance quickly pushed through the "obvious" barriers that everyone believed existed in the 1970s, and the value of parallel computing dropped to the point where it is used only in niche situations.Although a number of workstations of increasing capacity were designed and built over the project lifespan, they generally were quickly 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.
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, the program was terminated without having met its goals. The workstations had no appeal in a market where single-CPU systems could outrun them, and the software systems never worked, and were then made obsolete by the internet.