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From: chik@icot.jp (Chikayama Takashi)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.digest
Subject: Re: Say, what ever happened to ... ICOT Prolog?????
Message-ID: <8707150640.AA19371@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU>
Date: Tue, 14-Jul-87 21:32:20 EDT
Article-I.D.: ucbvax.8707150640.AA19371
Posted: Tue Jul 14 21:32:20 1987
Date-Received: Fri, 17-Jul-87 03:32:38 EDT
References: <8706111231.AA18169@mitre.arpa>
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Reply-To: chik@icot.icot.JUNET (Chikayama Takashi)
Distribution: world
Organization: ICOT, Tokyo, Japan
Lines: 45
Approved: ailist@stripe.sri.com
Summary: Well, it's going its way

In article <8706111231.AA18169@mitre.arpa> elsaesser%mwcamis@MITRE.ARPA writes:
>It seems ages ago that the 5th generation project was going to
>reinvent AI in a Prolog "engine" that was to do 10 gazillion "
>LIPS".  Anyone know what happened?  I mean, if you can make so many
>"quality" cars (sans auto transmission, useful A/C, paint that can take
>rain and sun, etc.), why can't you make a computer that runs an NP-complete
>applications language in real time???  Semi-seriously, what is the status
>of the 5th generation project, anyone got an update?

Well, we are sorry not distributing enough information to the AI
society.  Most papers related to ICOT's research are distributed to
the logic programming society but not to the AI world (I guess you
know how poor propagandist Japanese are:-).  Many are reported in:
	International Conference on Logic Programming
	IEEE Symposium on Logic Programming
Please look into proceedings of these conferences.

For about 10 gazillion LIPS computers: What our research of these 5
years revealed is that highly parallel hardware can never be practical
without much software effort, including new concepts in programming
languages.  More stress is put upon software than in the original
project plan.  Indeed, VLSI technology is dropped off from the
project.  Our experience shows that VLSI technology is NOT the most
difficult point in the way to realistic highly parallel computer
systems.  An efficient system with 256 processors may be built without
changing the software at all.  But for systems with 4096 processors,
we need a drastic change.  And this is what we need to achieve 10
gazillion LIPS.  NOT that VLSI technology has become easier, but that
we have found MORE difficult problems, unfortunately.

Where are we?  Well, one of our recent hardware achievement is the
development of the PSI-II machine, which executes 400 KLIPS (much less
than 10 gazillion, I guess :-).  It is a sequential machine and will
be used as element processors of our prototype parallel processor
Multi-PSI V2 (with 64 PE's), whose hardware is scheduled to come up at
the end of this year.

If you are interested in our research, a survey by myself titled:
	"Parallel Inference System Researches in the FGCS Project"
will be presented in the IEEE Symposium on Logic Programming, held at
San Francisco during Aug 31-Sep 4, 1987.  If you are more interested
in our project, please join the FGCS'88 conference.  It will be held
in Tokyo during Nov 28-Dec 2, 1988.

Takashi Chikayama