Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

'Fifth Generation' Became Japan's Lost Generation (1992)

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 53 posts

Re: 'Fifth Generation' Became Japan's Lost Generation (1992)

#21

Post by mieseratte »

jonathanyc wrote: post #18
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Drawing trite parallels is very ha-ha, but we have to remember that while Japan only has half the population of the US, China’s population is much more. It’s a little suspicious arguing that one Japanese person is somehow destined to be more productive and inventive than two American people; it is even more suspicious arguing the same for one American and five Chinese.

> one American and five Chinese

How many Chinese are meaningfully in the present? As I understood it, there was still a non-trivial population living in a less-than-modern way.

Re: 'Fifth Generation' Became Japan's Lost Generation (1992)

#22

Post by maxxxxx »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #4
mcguire wrote: post #2

Back 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.

It could also go the other way. There is no way to know it. If you can learn one thing from history it's that empires never last as dominant as they may seem at the time.

Re: 'Fifth Generation' Became Japan's Lost Generation (1992)

#23

Post by [deleted] »

mieseratte wrote: post #21
jonathanyc wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Drawing trite parallels is very ha-ha, but we have to remember that while Japan only has half the population of the US, China’s population is much more. It’s a little suspicious arguing that one Japanese person is somehow destined to be more productive and inventive than two American people; it is even more suspicious arguing the same for one American and five Chinese.

> one American and five Chinese How many Chinese are meaningfully in the present? As I understood it, there was still a non-trivial population living in a less-than-modern way.

[deleted]

Re: 'Fifth Generation' Became Japan's Lost Generation (1992)

#24

Post by vpribish »

mieseratte wrote: post #21
jonathanyc wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Drawing trite parallels is very ha-ha, but we have to remember that while Japan only has half the population of the US, China’s population is much more. It’s a little suspicious arguing that one Japanese person is somehow destined to be more productive and inventive than two American people; it is even more suspicious arguing the same for one American and five Chinese.

> one American and five Chinese How many Chinese are meaningfully in the present? As I understood it, there was still a non-trivial population living in a less-than-modern way.

interesting question! and how many in the US are in the present? and just _when_ in the world is silicon valley - or tokyo?

Re: 'Fifth Generation' Became Japan's Lost Generation (1992)

#25

Post by lkrubner »

gumby wrote: post #9

In 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 vi…

"these multi-company collaborations (Taligent, Itanium, even Power) rarely come to much."

That is a good point. A good example that's happening right now is https://www.roomkey.com/

If you read this you will be amazed by the technology that RoomKey developed:

"Against the Grain: How We Built the Next Generation Online Travel Agency using Amazon, Clojure, and a Comically Small Team"

http://www.colinsteele.org/post/23103789647/against-the-grai...

(Hotelicopter eventually rebranded as RoomKey)

The tech is amazing, but this is a company owned by a consortium of big hotels (Marriot, Sheraton, etc) and they have no interest in feeding a disruptive startup that threatens their business. Rather, they simply want RoomKey to exist so they can use it as leverage in negotiations with Expedia and Orbitz and maybe Kayak. In other words, they want to be able to say "Give us a better percentage of revenue or we will fully fund RoomKey and you will be sorry."

This truth is obvious to the tech at programmer, and they find it immensely frustrating.

It's the mis-aligned incentives that lead to the poisonous politics of these multi-company joint efforts.

Re: 'Fifth Generation' Became Japan's Lost Generation (1992)

#26

Post by wolfgke »

lkrubner wrote: post #25
gumby wrote: post #9

In 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 vi…

" these multi-company collaborations (Taligent, Itanium, even Power) rarely come to much. " That is a good point. A good example that's happening right now is https://www.roomkey.com/ If you read this you will be amazed by the technology that RoomKey developed: "Against the Grain: How We Built the Next Generation Online Travel Agency using Amazon, Clojure, and a Comically Small Team" http://www.colinsteele.org/post/2…

Perhaps I miss something for cultural reasons (I am not a US citizen nor do I live in the USA):

> The tech is amazing, but this is a company owned by a consortium of big hotels (Marriot, Sheraton, etc) and they have no interest in feeding a disruptive startup that threatens their business. Rather, they simply want RoomKey to exist so they can use it as leverage in negotiations with Expedia and Orbitz and maybe Kayak. In other words, they want to be able to say "Give us a better percentage of revenue or we will fully fund RoomKey and you will be sorry."

> This truth is obvious to the tech at programmer, and they find it immensely frustrating.

Why is this so frustrating to the programmers working there? They can work with interesting technology (e.g. Clojure). Yes, because of the incentives it will probably not become a really huge company, but again: where is the problem if they earn a good salary?

Re: 'Fifth Generation' Became Japan's Lost Generation (1992)

#27

Post by wrp »

drallison wrote: post #8

Moto-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.

Linguist James Marshall Unger in his book, The Fifth Generation Fallacy, argued that the primary motivation for FGCS reasearch was to develop NLP for the Japanese writing system. He claimed that the project was doomed to failure because the high level of ambiguity in the Japanese writing system required contextual understanding for even simple processing tasks. In that respect, things went as he predicted. Do Japanese IMEs like ATOK have any heritage in FGCS work?

Re: 'Fifth Generation' Became Japan's Lost Generation (1992)

#28

Post by wrp »

segmondy wrote: post #3
mcguire wrote: post #2

Back 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…

There were a few nearly identical parallelizations of Prolog. Besides KL1, there were Concurrent Prolog, GHC, Paralog, Strand, and Aldwych. The structure of Prolog-like concurrent systems is like the Actor model, based on message passing, and shares the problem of indeterminacy in the ordering of messages. These systems had to drop backtracking, because that requires access to a global stack.

In the end, it proved difficult to implement clause invocation in these languages as efficiently as procedure invocation in object-oriented programming languages. The combination of efficient inheritance-based procedure invocation together with class libraries and browsers was better than the slower pattern-directed clause invocation of the FGCS programming languages, so concurrent object-oriented message-passing languages like Java and C# became the mainstream.

I would suggest that the relational database approach is simpler and about as powerful as the rule-based approach to knowledge processing. From a practical point of view, any row of a Relatonal DataBase System table can be considered as a rule, provided that at least one attribute has been selected as an output.

Re: 'Fifth Generation' Became Japan's Lost Generation (1992)

#29

Post by Gravityloss »

wolfgke wrote: post #26
lkrubner wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

" these multi-company collaborations (Taligent, Itanium, even Power) rarely come to much. " That is a good point. A good example that's happening right now is https://www.roomkey.com/ If you read this you will be amazed by the technology that RoomKey developed: "Against the Grain: How We Built the Next Generation Online Travel Agency using Amazon, Clojure, and a Comically Small Team" http://www.colinsteele.org/post/2…

Perhaps I miss something for cultural reasons (I am not a US citizen nor do I live in the USA): > The tech is amazing, but this is a company owned by a consortium of big hotels (Marriot, Sheraton, etc) and they have no interest in feeding a disruptive startup that threatens their business. Rather, they simply want RoomKey to exist so they can use it as leverage in negotiations with Expedia and Orbitz and maybe Kayak.…

Because you want achieve positive things in your life's work, not pass time.

Re: 'Fifth Generation' Became Japan's Lost Generation (1992)

#30

Post by burg_phil »

lkrubner wrote: post #25
gumby wrote: post #9

In 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 vi…

" these multi-company collaborations (Taligent, Itanium, even Power) rarely come to much. " That is a good point. A good example that's happening right now is https://www.roomkey.com/ If you read this you will be amazed by the technology that RoomKey developed: "Against the Grain: How We Built the Next Generation Online Travel Agency using Amazon, Clojure, and a Comically Small Team" http://www.colinsteele.org/post/2…

How is this not considered anti-competitive behavior?
Post reply on HN