'Fifth Generation' Became Japan's Lost Generation (1992) • Hacker News Board

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

#41

Post by gwern » Wed, Mar 21, 2018, 2:29 AM UTC

mastazi wrote: post #37

> 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 W…

Specialized hardware/generalized hardware is one of the classic 'wheels of reincarnation' in computer tech: http://www.cap-lore.com/Hardware/Wheel.html

But looking back over the last 20 years, at least for the silicon paradigm, I think we may finally be in the last turn of the wheel. The trend back towards specialized hardware (for audio, video, encryption, NN, servers vs smartphones) seems fairly inexorable. There's no CPU architecture remotely on the horizon which is general and blows away everything else for flexibility and speed. Even specialized hardware like GPUs are starting to see their lunch eaten by ultra-specialized ASICs and TPUs.

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

#42

Post by geophile » Wed, Mar 21, 2018, 4:39 AM UTC

ghaff wrote: post #34

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 m…

The research arm of CCA disappeared in 1988, at the same time that Symbolics (and other Lisp machine companies) was failing. So I, along with a few Symbolics people, were looking for the next thing to do, as OO databases were becoming a thing. We were brought together by an entrepreneur and formed Object Design, one of the batch of OO database companies of the late 80s/early 90s. Those Symbolics guys were absolutely brilliant.

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

#43

Post by ScottBurson » Wed, Mar 21, 2018, 5:04 AM UTC

geophile wrote: post #42

ghaff wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 m…

The research arm of CCA disappeared in 1988, at the same time that Symbolics (and other Lisp machine companies) was failing. So I, along with a few Symbolics people, were looking for the next thing to do, as OO databases were becoming a thing. We were brought together by an entrepreneur and formed Object Design, one of the batch of OO database companies of the late 80s/early 90s. Those Symbolics guys were absolutely…

I remember ObjectStore. Tried to use it, but it didn't work that well for our use case; we were better off doing serialization. Very interesting design, though.

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

#44

Post by lispm » Wed, Mar 21, 2018, 7:55 AM UTC

ghaff wrote: post #34

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 m…

Notable is also that Lucid's Energize C++ programming environment used Objectstore, too. Lucid was known for its excellent Common Lisp implementation.

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

#45

Post by lispm » Wed, Mar 21, 2018, 8:00 AM UTC

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…

I wonder whether the MCC had ever a plan to move things they developed into 'production'. From the Lisp side this was things like Cyc, the UIMS they developed, the CAD system and the object database (Orion). The object database appeared later as a product.

https://www.uni-ulm.de/~sbauer/programming/OOinfo/FAQ/oo-faq...

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

#46

Post by wolfgke » Wed, Mar 21, 2018, 10:02 AM UTC

ACow_Adonis wrote: post #38

wolfgke wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Have no meaning in the work that we do

To create a website that serves as an important bollock against other travel websites that endanger the company that pays you is not what I would call meaningless.

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

#47

Post by dcldcl » Wed, Mar 21, 2018, 2:45 PM UTC

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #36

dcldcl wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Oh yeah I'm not saying the model is great, but if someone wants to discount the 1 to 4.3 ratio, that's the estimate I'd throw out there.

And if we take in the half rural estimate, that'd already put it at 1 to 1 today (with lots of room for growth).

Agreed that Chongqing is fairly different (since it's forced "urbanization" due to the Three Gorges Dam). But I've heard a lot of people say Beijing and Shanghai make NYC look "small" in comparison.

Even LA and NY have lots of parts that many Americans may not consider as living "meaningfully in the present" from the point of view being able to work on advanced projects like "Fifth Generation" computing.

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

#48

Post by lkrubner » Wed, Mar 21, 2018, 4:48 PM UTC

burg_phil wrote: post #30

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…

How is this not considered anti-competitive behavior?

Well, it would be competitive for Marriot or Sheraton to launch a new company to compete with Expedia or Orbitz. It is somewhat less competitive for them to buy a startup that is already doing that, but if they gave the startup a lot of money, so it could better compete with giants, then that would help increase competition. But to buy a startup only because you want some leverage against Expedia and Orbitz, and to let that startup die, is unfortunate in several ways. It wastes the efforts of a lot of good people, and it allows the total amount of competition in the system to decrease.

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

#49

Post by mcguire » Wed, Mar 21, 2018, 5:47 PM UTC

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #12

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…

>> He wasn't a fan. Given the historical circumstances, I'll be he would prefer they were trying to build a parallel Lisp machine.

If I remember correctly, we did have a lab full of TI Lisp machines at the time. Never used them myself, though.

The interesting point, though, was that the specific goals were not clearly related to the fundamental reasons for doing it. And as it turned out, most of the research topics (but not all, IIRC) were really boosted by work in graphics co-processors.

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

#50

Post by MichaelMoser123 » Thu, Mar 22, 2018, 1:44 AM UTC

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…

I was just wondering: How does the 5th generation project compare to IBM Watson? (both are expert systems/rule based systems) Was it possible to pull off a system like that on 80ies minicomputers? I suspect that the PDP 10 too limited for the amount of data processing required. Maybe one could have done that with rule based systems on a mainframe of the day.