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

nytimes.com

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

#31

Post by watwut »

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.…

Boring repetitive project in closure is still boring.

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

#32

Post by [deleted] »

wrp wrote: post #28
segmondy wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 di…

[deleted]

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

#33

Post by mieseratte »

vpribish wrote: post #24
mieseratte wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

I mean, straight up subsistence farming populations. Not "building Facebook for cats."

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

#34

Post by ghaff »

geophile wrote: post #14

I was at Computer Corporation of America for a few years, until 1988, in the research group. It was quite illustrious in its day, producing very interesting research and prototypes, (concurrency control, extended relational databases, the Adaplex project). We were aware of both the 5th Generation project, and the US "competitor", MCC. Remember, at the time, Japan was an economic and technical powerhouse, There were c…

At the time, there were a lot of voices pushing the idea that public-private partnerships in the Japanese MITI vein were the future. Economists like Lester Thurow vehemently argued that the US wasn't doing nearly enough in this vein and was going to lose out to Japan as a result.

The history of AI research is sort of messy but around the end of the 1980s you were entering one of the AI winters. As you say, a lot of money had been pumped into expert systems without a lot of commercial success (and some high-profile failures). The Lisp machine market was collapsing. It probably didn't help that a lot of the big computer companies at the time (the Route 128 minicomputer makers) were collectively struggling.

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

#35

Post by dcldcl »

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.

While I don't have solid economic numbers (good luck with that in China), if I had a to guess it would make that ratio still one American to two Chinese.

Here's a model that I'll use to back up that idea:

Top 5 US CSAs: NY, LA, Chicago, DC, SF Bay Area: 70.8 million people.

Top 5 Chinese Metro Areas: Guangzhou, Shanghai, Chongqing, Beijing, Hangzhou: 149 million.

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

#36

Post by seanmcdirmid »

dcldcl wrote: post #35
mieseratte wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

While I don't have solid economic numbers (good luck with that in China), if I had a to guess it would make that ratio still one American to two Chinese. Here's a model that I'll use to back up that idea: Top 5 US CSAs: NY, LA, Chicago, DC, SF Bay Area: 70.8 million people. Top 5 Chinese Metro Areas: Guangzhou, Shanghai, Chongqing, Beijing, Hangzhou: 149 million.

Are you including the rural populations of each city? Chongqing, for example, is actually fairly rural, it’s basically what we would call a state.

Chinese municipalities are complicated. Even Beijing is about half rural.

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

#37

Post by mastazi »

> these days, few people want specialized computers for artificial intelligence, preferring powerful general-purpose machines like those made by Sun Microsystems Inc., a fast-growing Silicon Valley company.

This is a starking example of how tech cycles change over time. The period in which the article was written was during an AI Winter (in fact, the Fifth Generation program is listed as a notable example[1] in the Wikipedia entry for "AI Winter") and Sun Microsystems was still in its prime at the time (work on the yet to be released Java language had started just 12 months[2] before).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter#The_fizzle_of_the_fi...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_(programming_language)#Hi...

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

#38

Post by ACow_Adonis »

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 technology is the means, not the ends. Many of us work with tech not because we're fetishists for proximity or status of technology, but because we recognise that the technology is a means to actually do something meaningful in the world.

Have no meaning in the work that we do, and job-wise we'll be as happy working with tech as we were flipping burgers at McDonald's: pay and conditions aside obviously.

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

#39

Post by gwern »

Speaking of which, tonight I made a scan of _Japan as Number One: Lessons for America_, Vogel 1979: http://libgen.io/book/index.php?md5=10dd41d874075bdd04be0a46... https://www.dropbox.com/s/rr14mgyq8cnrp32/1979-vogel-japanas... https://mega.nz/#!peoiWAya!siIb9bDw6JbX9-toqTj6bP5iW4VlVTK4b...

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

#40

Post by 2sk21 »

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…

I confess that I too fell for the 5th gen hype and spent a couple years diving deep into Prolog in the mid 80s. It wasn't a total waste however, I still find my knowledge of Prolog coming in handy. Logic programming is an interesting concept, but not in the way they envisaged it in the 80s. In particular, I am fascinated by answer set programming. There is no need to shoe-hard Turing completeness into logic programming.
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