'Fifth Generation' Became Japan's Lost Generation (1992)
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Re: 'Fifth Generation' Became Japan's Lost Generation (1992)
#2Back in about 1988, Bruce Porter, one of my AI professors, described the problem statement of the Fifth Generation project as, "a list of important research topics like natural language understanding, speech recognition, and so forth, and the statement, 'Therefore we will build a parallel Prolog machine.'" He wasn't a fan.
On the other hand, according to the tech press at the time, the Japanese were going to eat our lunch. Put us all out of work. Rule the world with an iron fist.
Re: 'Fifth Generation' Became Japan's Lost Generation (1992)
#3Back in about 1988, Bruce Porter, one of my AI professors, described the problem statement of the Fifth Generation project as, "a list of important research topics like natural language understanding, speech recognition, and so forth, and the statement, 'Therefore we will build a parallel Prolog machine.'" He wasn't a fan. On the other hand, according to the tech press at the time, the Japanese were going to eat our…
A Parallel prolog machine is a great idea. Just because it failed to take off doesn't mean the idea shouldn't be explored again. The difference in CPU design in 88 and today is amazing. Prolog is one of those languages that just automatically lends itself well to AND/OR conditions without having to change any code.
I personally still see a future there, Von Neumaan has only taken us so far. We need alternate CPU designs.
Re: 'Fifth Generation' Became Japan's Lost Generation (1992)
#4Back in about 1988, Bruce Porter, one of my AI professors, described the problem statement of the Fifth Generation project as, "a list of important research topics like natural language understanding, speech recognition, and so forth, and the statement, 'Therefore we will build a parallel Prolog machine.'" He wasn't a fan. On the other hand, according to the tech press at the time, the Japanese were going to eat our…
> On the other hand, according to the tech press at the time, the Japanese were going to eat our lunch. Put us all out of work. Rule the world with an iron fist.
Sound familiar? Thankfully history doesn’t repeat itself with another Asian country going all in on AI with a scary huge real estate bubble.
Re: 'Fifth Generation' Became Japan's Lost Generation (1992)
#5I've been intrigued lately by the notion of Japan's "Fifth Generation", and wonder what was the nature of the research being done, its actual results, etc. I'm also wondering if there are possible links that we could try to establish with the current AI boom. One interesting book I found about the subject is this one:
https://www.amazon.ca/Fifth-Generation-Artificial-Intelligen...
But as it's from 1983 (i.e. right in the actual period), I don't think the historical perspective would be very present. Anyone has other interesting reading suggestions?
Re: 'Fifth Generation' Became Japan's Lost Generation (1992)
#6Back in about 1988, Bruce Porter, one of my AI professors, described the problem statement of the Fifth Generation project as, "a list of important research topics like natural language understanding, speech recognition, and so forth, and the statement, 'Therefore we will build a parallel Prolog machine.'" He wasn't a fan. On the other hand, according to the tech press at the time, the Japanese were going to eat our…
A Parallel prolog machine is a great idea. Just because it failed to take off doesn't mean the idea shouldn't be explored again. The difference in CPU design in 88 and today is amazing. Prolog is one of those languages that just automatically lends itself well to AND/OR conditions without having to change any code. I personally still see a future there, Von Neumaan has only taken us so far. We need alternate CPU desi…
I agree, along with a huge range of parallel machines.
Parallel machines weren't a great idea in the early 90s, because you could barely get one decent CPU on a chip and adding memory turned it into a large board per core. Now you can have satisfying numbers of CPUs plus memory on a single chip, and even a useful prototype on an FPGA.
Re: 'Fifth Generation' Became Japan's Lost Generation (1992)
#7This reminded me of the $560MM "AI Fund" South Korea touted after the AlphaGo-Sedol Go competition [0]. Looking for news now, it seems like they teamed up with Singapore and are taking a less centralized approach. From [1]:
Gwangju Metropolitan City (GMC) plans to set aside US$920 million (1 trillion won) to support the AI Town Project, which is expected to incubate 1,000 AI-oriented startups and educate and train 5,000 for the sector within the decade, starting from 2019.
The 3 sub-projects of the AI Town Project include: (1) Establishment of AI Research Institute, (2) Development of AI-oriented Campus, and (3) Creation of AI-oriented Start-up Ecosystem.
[0] https://www.nature.com/news/south-korea-trumpets-860-million... [1] https://www.opengovasia.com/articles/singapore-and-south-kor...
Re: 'Fifth Generation' Became Japan's Lost Generation (1992)
#8Moto-oka Tohru and Hideo Aiso often said privately that an unstated goal in the Japanese Fifth Generation project was the creation of a practical way to keyboard written Japanese and that with regard to that issue it was an unqualified success.
Re: 'Fifth Generation' Became Japan's Lost Generation (1992)
#9In 1984 I visited NTT's 5th generation effort (and later worked at MCC, featured prominently in the article).
At the time I had a bitmapped display on my desk which I connected to a dedicated Lisp machine (Dorado). At the 5Gen office there was a row of desks with shared character terminals (one for every two developers) connected to the workhorse PDP-10 (same machine we used for research in the USA). The guy I was visiting was glad he only had to share the terminal with one other person. It was my first introduction to the blue collar status of programmers in Japan -- but without the respect that, say, a machinist gets in the US. It seemed pretty unlikely they'd have the opportunity to innovate.
The MCC response wasn't much better (perhaps the nearby Sematch did better? I don't know). It was also stupid and bureaucratic and although they did recruit a bunch of very smart folks from US and Mexican universities, I never saw much impact either (though I had two symbolics 3600s terminals on my desk). I don't think it's a government issue -- these multi-company collaborations (Taligent, Itanium, even Power) rarely come to much.
Of course companies can work together -- standards organizations and joint development projects are common. But IMHO a diffuse "consortium" really has no reason to exist beyond its own existence.
Re: 'Fifth Generation' Became Japan's Lost Generation (1992)
#10I've been intrigued lately by the notion of Japan's "Fifth Generation", and wonder what was the nature of the research being done, its actual results, etc. I'm also wondering if there are possible links that we could try to establish with the current AI boom. One interesting book I found about the subject is this one: https://www.amazon.ca/Fifth-Generation-Artificial-Intelligen... But as it's from 1983 (i.e. right in…
There was another highly critical book from the same era that said that the Japanese were trying to use AI to adapt their more traditional writing system to computerization and it would be madness for other countries to throw money at AI in the 80's just because the Japanese were. I'm trying to find a reference now if anyone can help.
Edit: https://www.amazon.com/Fifth-Generation-Fallacy-Artificial-I...