Fifth generation computer

The Fifth Generation Computer Systems project (FGCS) was an initiative by Japan's Ministry of International Trade and Industry, begun in 1982, to create a "fifth generation computer" (see history of computing hardware) which was supposed to perform much calculation utilizing massive parallelism. It was to be the end result of a massive government/industry research project in Japan during the 1980s. It aimed to create an "epoch-making computer" with supercomputer-like performance and usable artificial intelligence capabilities

The term fifth generation was intended to convey the system as being a leap beyond existing machines. Computers using vacuum tubes were called the first generation; transistors and diodes, the second; ICs, the third; and those using microprocessors, the fourth. Whereas previous computer generations had focused on increasing the number of logic elements in a single CPU, the fifth generation, it was widely believed at the time, would instead turn to massive numbers of CPUs for added perform

Background and Design Philosophy

Throughout these multiple generations since the 1980s, Japan had largely been a follower in terms of computing advancement, building computers following US and British leads. The Ministry for International Trade and Industry (MITI) decided to attempt to break out of this follow-the-leader pattern, and in the mid-1970s started looking, on a small scale, into the future of computing. They asked the Japan Information Processing Development Center (JIPDEC) to indicate a number of future directions, and in 1979 offered a three-year contract to carry out more in-depth studies along with industry and academia. It was during this period that the term "fifth-generation computer" started to be used

The primary fields for investigation from this initial project were:

Inference computer technologies for knowledge processing

Computer technologies to process large-scale data bases and knowledge bases

High performance workstations

Distributed functional computer technologies

Super-computers for scientific calculation

The project imagined a parallel processing computer running on top of massive databases (as opposed to a traditional filesystem) using a logic programming language to access the data. They envisioned building a prototype machine with performance between 100M and 1G LIPS, where a LIPS is a Logical Inferences Per Second. At the time typical workstation machines were capable of about 100k LIPS. They proposed to build this machine over a ten year period, 3 years for initial R&D, 4 years for building various subsystems, and a final 3 years to complete a working prototype system. In 1982 the government decided to go ahead with the project, and established the Institute for New Generation Computer Technology (ICOT) through joint investment with various Japanese computer companies.