An overview and appraisal of the Fifth Generation Computer System project

Abstract An overview will be given in this paper of the original plans of the Japanese Fifth Generation Computer Systems project and they will be compared with what has actually been achieved in the project's ten years of work. This is done by looking at the results demonstrated at the 1992 FGCS Conference, in the form of some 20 application programs all running on the PIM (Parallel Inference Machine) hardware and written in (systems written on top of) KL1. KL1 is the language developed for the FGCS project for the operating system controlling hundreds of processors, as well as for applications. It is derived from Prolog and could be called a Logic Programming language. Also the results of a team of international experts, asked by ICOT to evaluate the success of the FGCS project, will be given in a condensed form.