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REPORT

Japan's fifth generation computer project Successes and failures

Michael Cross

In November 1988 an international conference was held in Tokyo, organized by the Japanese Institute of New Generation Technology, to review the progress of Japan's fifth generation computer project and to launch the project's final phase. This report looks back to the origins of the project, comments on its aims and achievements, assesses criticisms of the project, and looks at expectations and prospects for the project's future.

Japan in the late 1980s retains a striking faith in the power of high technology to solve the country's problems of the future. The government backs ambitious projects to develop high-speed magneti- cally levitated trains, to improve com- munications in the mountainous archipelago. The influential Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) is studying ways of digging caverns deep underground, as sites for factories and power stations in Japan's overcrowded cities. MITI is also trying to round up support from the USA and Europe to build a second generation supersonic transport aircraft, able to slash travelling times between Japan and the USA, its major political and economic partner.

None of these projects has had anything like the international impact of the scheme which MITI announced in October 1981 to develop a fifth genera- tion of computers, capable of reasoning as humans do. The project began in spring 1982 and was to run for 10 years. Inside Japan, the project was seen as a

Michael Cross is the Japan correspondent of New Scientist magazine. His address is: Shin Nichibo Building, 6th Floor, 1-2-1 Sarugaku- cho, Chiyoda-ku, T101, Tokyo, Japan.

relatively modest attempt to develop technologies to overcome the problems of the 21st century. 1 It would also help Japanese industry catch up with the rest of the world in the new technologies of artificial intelligence (AI).

The outside world reacted with alarm, seeing the fifth generation project as a Japanese threat to dominate the world's computing industry in the 1990s. 2 It sparked off an unprecedented number of government-supported re- search projects in Europe and the USA, most notably the Alvey programme of collaborative research in the UK.

Promising research Seven years after the start of the fifth generation programme, the outside world is taking a more relaxed view. In November 1988, an international confer- ence in Tokyo organized by the Institute of New Generation Computer Technolo- gy (ICOT), created to manage the fifth generation, reviewed progress to date and launched the final phase. ICOT used the conference to unveil some promis- ing research work. Its researchers were mainly optimistic about achieving their goals, but, with surprising candour, said that the project could yet fail. Some

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foreign experts said that ICOT had left its most difficult tasks to last, and may even have taken entirely the wrong road to- wards AI. 3

To examine these ideas, we must first look at precisely what the fifth generation project set out to achieve. Electronic computers have passed through four generations, each marked by an improvement in electronic tech- nology, since they appeared in the 1940s. The first machines were built with valves. The invention of transistors pro- duced the second generation and inte- grated circuits the third. Fourth genera- tion machines have very large-scale inte- grated circuits and handle sophisticated programming languages.

Different sort of leap

MITI planned the fifth generation as a different sort of leap, to overcome the problems that present-day computers face, whatever their electronic designs. The main one is that today's computers are not much good at processing in- formation which comes in any form other than numbers. To become part of everyday life, in particular to be able to receive orders in human language rather that precise programmes, computers need to be able to handle knowledge, which is a tricky commodity to represent electronically.

The project's architects believed that a fifth generation of computers, which processed knowledge rather than numbers, and which human beings could instruct in natural language, would change the world. They painted a picture of computer-contolled robots moving out of their present tightly de- fined workplaces into the primary indus- tries of agriculture and fishing.

Fifth generation computers would take direct control of many industrial tasks, making fewer mistakes than hu- man beings and consuming natural re- sources more wisely. They would care for Japan's rapidly ageing population. Machines which understood spoken and written Japanese would end the coun- try's old problem of communicating with the rest of the world, contributing to world peace.

The programme to develop these

machines is surprisingly modest in size. 4 ICOT in Tokyo employs about 90 resear- chers and 10 administrators. Most of the staff are on loan from 10 companies and two government research centres-- MITI's Electrotechnical Laboratory and Mechanical Engineering Laboratory. ICOT's budget for the financial year 1989-90 is 6.4 billion yen (just over $50 million), a 12.5% rise over the previous year's.

Hop, step and jump

The research itself fell into three stages, which Kazuhiro Fuchi, ICOT's research director, calls 'hop, step and jump'. The first phase, from 1982 to 1984, concen- trated on developing as research tools computers which were capable of mak- ing inferences, drawing out facts not explicitly stated in raw data. A favourite judgment of conventional computers' 'dumbness' is their inability to do this.

The second phase, which ended with last year's international conference, produced the electronic hardware for dramatically increasing the power of 'inference machines' through the tech- nology of parallel processing. At the conference, s ICOT unveiled a computer called Multi-PSI which links 64 proces- sing units, or personal sequential infer- ence units, in one machine. These 64 units run in parallel, and form the basis of work on the machine which will eventually become the 1000-processor fifth generation computer. The team also developed programming languages and a system which understands sentences in Japanese.

In the final stage, the 'jump' which began in April 1989, ICOT will try to combine all these technologies. Fuchi said he did not expect too many prob- lems in creating a computer with 1000 processors running in parallel, the so- called Parallel Inference Machine. Mak- ing the software work, however, is un- known territory. 'This is an area on which almost no work has been done as yet,' he told the conference.

Fuchi even said that he does not necessarily expect to produce a pro- totype fifth generation computer, and that integrating the various technologies could throw up difficulties which might

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send his team back to square one. In a carefully worded statement on the prog- ramme's lessons, Fuchi said: 'A tempta- tion is to set targets too high . . . these are often caused by the naYve optimism of some researchers'. 6

One criticism ICOT faces is that it based its entire strategy on one tech- nological approach, massively parallel architecture. In particular, it ignores a rival technology which has returned to favour during the 1980s, that of creating neural computers, with electronics laid out in a similar way to the neurons in the human brain.

Neural computers

Such machines lend themselves to jobs such as recognizing patterns, or hand- ling 'fuzzy' data, which conventional computers find extremely difficult. Several Japanese companies, including Fujitsu, the world's fourth largest com- puter maker, are working on neural computers. And MITI has chosen the subject for its next project to develop AI.

Another criticism of the fifth genera- tion project was that its origins were fundamentally flawed. The University of Hawaii linguist J. Marshall Unger, in a book entitled The Fifth Generat ion Fallacy, 7 suggested that the project was based on a misunderstanding. His theory is that Japanese strategists, obses- sed by the need to produce computers capable of handling written Japanese, took at face value exaggerated US claims of advances in AI.

Unger described the project and its international imitators as: 'a spectacular international game of the blind leading the blind, at public expense, in the impossible quest for pure, disembodied intell igence.'

Most of the world's computer ex- perts who came to Tokyo for the ICOT conference would regard Unger's judg- ment as far too harsh. While it is true that intell igent machines remain as elu- sive now as they did in 1981 (indeed, one school of thought holds that this will always be the case. As soon as a compu-

ter becomes capable of meeting one particular definit ion of intelligence, such as playing a good game of chess, hu- mans set a new definition), 8 it is too early to write the fifth generation project off as a failure. The project had many other goals apart from simply building a 'fifth generation box'.

ICOT's research, which is open to the world through collaborative agree- ments with the USA, France and most recently the UK, has contributed valu- able understanding of one technological pathway towards AI.

Meanwhile, Japan's computer in- dustry, traditionally far weaker in soft- ware than in hardware, was persuaded almost by force to take AI seriously. The industry now has available a cadre of young computer scientists with experi- ence at the cutting edge of AI research. If the industry goes on to use this human talent in developing AI products for the 1990s, MITI will count its fifth generation venture as a success.

Notes and references

1. Tohru Moto-oka and Masaru Kitsuregawa, The Fifth Generation Computer: the Japanese Challenge (Chichester, UK, Wiley, 1985). Edward A. Feigenbaum and Pamela McCor- duck, The Fifth Generation; Artificial In- telligence and Japan's Computer Chal- lenge to the World (London, Pan Books, 1984). Michael Cross, 'Do computers dream of intelligent humans?', New Scientist, 26 November 1988, page 42. Outline of Fifth Generation Computer Pro- ject (Tokyo, ICOT, 1987) gives a more detailed description of the project. Susan Watts, 'Japan shares its fifth genera- tion dream', New Scientist, 10 December 1988, page 26. Susan Watts and Michael Cross, 'Japan's fifth generation failure', New Scientist, 3 December 1988, page 25. J. Marshall Unger, The Fifth Generation Fallacy (Oxford, UK, Oxford University Press, 1987). Roger C. Schank's book The Cognitive Computer (New York, Addison-Wesley, 1984) explores such ideas.

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