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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)

#11

Post by gumby »

cjauvin wrote: post #5

I'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 no technical link -- neural nets were still unpopular (largely, if unfairly, as a result of the '67 Perceptrons book0 and most work was on symbolic systems and, in the later period, expert systems. but what passed for AI systems at the time were quite powerful, if limited, just as what are called AI systems today are quite powerful, if limited.

"Unfair" in that the book wasn't intended to destroy work on NNs, but was used to justify abandoning the field of work, until multilayer networks (discussed Perceptrons) were re"discovered" in the 90s.

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

#12

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

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.

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

#13

Post by PaulHoule »

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…

The 5th generation project found that Prolog isn't very parallelizable and thus they created a language called KL1 which was more parallelizable than Prolog but not as good in other ways.

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

#14

Post by geophile »

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 concerns about the Japanese buying up valuable real estate in New York. We were worried about the trade imbalance. So 5GP was quite threatening to some.

I remember meeting one of the 5GP researchers who credited MCC for scaring the Japanese into greatly increasing funding for computer science in his country. And one of the other comments here pointed out that the fear worked in the other direction too.

Another commenter here talked about Prolog. One of the lines of research at the time was on "expert systems", and if I remember correctly, Prolog was one of the major languages for research in that area. An expert system was a set of rules for solving a problem in some domain. It was yet another failed attempt at AI, which didn't really work beyond toy problems. (Of course, now, those rules come out of machine learning systems, but the rules are kind of inscrutable.)

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

#15

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

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

#16

Post by [deleted] »

[deleted] wrote: post #15
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.

[deleted]

[deleted]

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

#17

Post by CodeArtisan »

cjauvin wrote: post #5

I'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…

Never i have been able to find a pdf of Fifth Generation Computer Systems ’92 which is the report of the last FGCS conference that happened in 1992. https://books.google.com/books?id=hDeiTuxLU7YC

Here a summary of what was expected from FGCS:

What is required of the 5th generation computer - social needs and its impact (1982) https://imgur.com/a/HPYCL

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

#18

Post by jonathanyc »

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.

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.

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

#20

Post by seanmcdirmid »

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.

The parallels are downright freaky. Think about it:

* Sense that they will rule the world

* Incredibly bubbly real estate market

* Exporting this bubble to North America west coast

* Huge bets on AI

* Zombie companies (SOEs)

* Rapidly aging worforce

Yes, there are some difference, China is much larger than Japan but it is also much poorer than Japan (on a per capita basis). The country as a whole isn't that well educated (compulsory education only goes to 9th grade, extremely uneven resources applied to rural areas and different cities).

Who knows how this will play off, I'm guessing a China crash will be much worse in scale than Japan coming down in the late 80s/early 90s, but China will also be able to recover much more quickly after it happens given there is still room for development.

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