8 ms·

The Fifth Generation Computing Project

86 points by o_nate 7y ago

YeGoblynQueenne 7y ago
>> If you want to read about the actual tech they were harping as bringing MUH SWINGULARITY, go read Norvig’s AIMA book. This was still the main AI textbook in 2014 when I did my MSc in the subject. It is what is rightly called a "seminal text" and there is not a single trace of Singularitarianism in it. It's not just "Norvig's book". Its authors are Peter Norvig and Stuart Russel. Is Stuart Russel ignored because he is not at Google? The article really needs to cool down on the hindsight triumphalism. A lot of people were very optimistic about AI in the '80s (as earlier) because significant and continued progress had been made. Scientific progress, the continuation of the work of the Logicians in the '20s and Church and Turing's work in the '30s. Sure, people in the industry just wanted to make a quick buck, as they always do. But interesting science was being done and it is a big loss that the AI winter disrupted its course. Not because it could have led to autonomous vehicles and conversational agents. What we lost in the winter was the opportunity to discover new knowledge. That is a tragedy. So I really don't understand where all the schadenfreude comes from, in the article. A big commercial project failed and took with it a whole branch of computer science. Who, exactly, benefited from this?
- gumby 7y ago
  > So I really don't understand where all the schadenfreude comes from, in the article. A big commercial project failed and took with it a whole branch of computer science. Who, exactly, benefited from this? It wasn't a big commercial system; it was a big government system (you probably can't imagine the degree of shock and awe that greeted MITI people or even the mention of the minstry in the US). This was when Japan was going to destroy America and goodamnit, Something Must Be Done. Of course as happens with such projects it all comes tumbling down, but usually with a whimper. Apollo is another good example: they hit their goal and then what? 5Gen was the more common case: just wasted away. The schadenfreude comes not just from the central planning hubris but from the American freak-out response to what was really hype and a squib. The author says the same thing is happening today, with the hype-o-meter on 11, again in the AI field, and again with an "asian menace" on the horizon, this time China. 5Gen just rode a hype machine though; it didn't take the field out -- we could all see that coming anyway.
  - foobiekr 7y ago
    I think people today have a very hard time understanding what things were like during the Japan bubble from about 1987 to 1990. Coming out of the 1970s Japan ended up dominating certain parts of the electronics - and especially personal electronics, like radios or portable cassette players. They had terribly failed in _information technology_ however, but most people didn't know that, what they saw was walkmen, MITI coordinating wiping out American DRAM and television producers using dumping (among other things) and so on. Another important event was that the US dollar was very high in the mid-1980s (Reagan deliberately de-valuing the dollar was frequent discussion on the morning news). A side effect of this was the transfer of investment to other shores, and Japan being the primary beneficiary. BOJ dropped interest rates a great deal and a speculative asset and property bubble was launched. This culminated in the purchase of many, many high-profile assets in the United States by the Japanese keiretsu and banks. The Japanese were in a mania, and a lot of investors world-wide were as well, and the Americans, in particular, were experiencing a kind of crisis of faith in US-style capitalism. Like most bubbles (try explaining the dotcom), it is very hard to make someone understand what happened. You can recount the facts but not the emotional context.
    - selimthegrim 7y ago
      James Burke had a climate special (After the Warming) in about 1989-90 where his ideal future was the Japanese running things in a world government. Seems to have captured the zeitgeist and the present (creepy to hear the bit in the beginning though about "full-scale evacuation of New Orleans"). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RfE8wBReIxw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RfE8wBReIxw
      - foobiekr 7y ago
        Wow. This is crazy.
        selimthegrim 7y ago
        His optimism is touching. The bit about carbon trading struck me. Lately I've been questioning the dogma of one man, one vote. What if the only way to democratically resolve climate change is to inversely weight your vote by the amount of carbon you emit?
- brighter2morrow 7y ago
  >This was still the main AI textbook in 2014 when I did my MSc in the subject FYI seminal books don't rotate in and out over a five year timespan, it is still the seminal book and will likely continue to be given all the fuel being burned on neural networks that generate more heat than light.
  - neilv 7y ago
    I had an intro AI class for which Leslie Kaelbling got use of a draft of Russell&Norvig (it was 2 thick stacks of photocopies, with comb bindings), before it became famous. Good call, LPK. Sadly, I donated&sold all my books when I did an extreme-minimalism housing move after grad school, or I'd still own this collector's item.
    - brighter2morrow 7y ago
      Wow that is cool, and I feel bad for you because that would be a cool collector's item! Though to be practical, I do prefer nicely bound and polished publications rather than the photocopied and combly bound.
- gumby 7y ago
  By the way, though signifying nothing but apropos to this topic: Stuart worked with us at MCC, Peter did not.
- api 7y ago
  Ragging on things that failed with the benefit of hindsight is a good way to sound smart. I have never liked that genre much. 5gen failed but Apollo, the Manhattan Project, DARPANet, the Bell Labs transistor project, and SpaceX reusable boosters (for a contemporary example) succeeded. This piece argues that the ambitious megaproject successes were more decomposable but I find this rationale to be an unconvincing post-hoc just-so story. The conclusion I draw when I look over the history of innovation is that it's like a rare animal that almost never mates in captivity or one of those exotic fungi we can barely culture. We know how to set up conditions where innovation can happen: get smart people, provide capital, give them an ambitious but not impossible goal. Beyond this it's serendipity. Sometimes the muse pays a visit and sometimes it doesn't. The dynamics seem almost identical to what you see in art and music, and I don't think that's coincidence. Science and engineering are perhaps more like the arts than we tend to think. 5gen probably would never have achieved all its goals, but it might have achieved something really notable had the muse chosen to pay a visit.
  - lioeters 7y ago
    This is my favorite comment in this whole thread. Looking back on big failures in history, it's too easy to point out the obvious mistakes or logical reasons why it failed, how unrealistic their dreams were. That narrative doesn't take into account that notable successes in history, major innovations, were born from basically the same ingredients in a shared cultural context. The difference was (at least seemingly) often just a slight chance variation in conditions, being in the right place at the right time, working on an idea that happened to be ready to blossom. I love the parallels you draw with exotic fungi, how sensitive these ambitious ideas are to its environment. There are so many ways it can fail, and the reason for success is often elusive and serendipitous. > Science and engineering are perhaps more like the arts than we tend to think This seems related to how great art and music are often born of a "cultural milieu", like the jazz scene, or Paris cafe culture in the 1920's that fostered poets, painters, musicians. I imagine Xerox PARC was like that, a vibrant intellectual subculture of creative people who worked in the medium of technology. Speaking of the muse, I like the popular expression, "The elves have left Middle Earth." There's a kind of indescribable "magic" that can inhabit a place and time, pulling everyone around under its spell. Then, as mysteriously as it appeared, it's gone - leaving behind relics of wonders, art works or artifacts, that reason alone cannot explain.
- Animats 7y ago
  One of the hilarious things about 5th generation computers is how certain people were about all this. More like painful. I went through Stanford in the mid-1980s, about when it was clear that expert systems were only marginally useful and strong AI was not around the corner. Many faculty were in serious denial about this. You can write rules for an expert system, and what you get out is pretty much what you put in. Too many rules, and you're likely to have contradictions and the inference system gets confused. The logicians were trying hard to fix that, which generated a lot of papers with obscure notations. Eventually we did get massive parallelism, but it doesn't look anything like the Thinking Machines or LISP machine approach.
- kragen 7y ago
  I think Locklin is saying that AIMA is a good source for understanding GOFAI, and that GOFAI was touted as on the verge of achieving AGI, not that AIMA touted GOFAI as being on the verge of achieving AGI. I agree with your distaste for the self-congratulatory tone.
ggm 7y ago
"I had friends on that deathstar" basically: I was working in the UK JANET community, with people I knew doing Alvey project funded 5th Generation work. The projects had a very strong "catch up or we will loose the war" feel to them, because the Japanese were pumping money into things which made ICL, Olivetti,Ci-Honeywell-Bull,Ferranti,GEC very nervous. Domestic-Strategic outcomes vested in having strong world-comparable computing manufacturing: What if they "out thought us" The one I can remember (from 40 years distance) is the GEC4000 project in Newcastle University, which included GEC-Plessy, Newcastle and York and Glasgow University, in a joint computing project. the GEC4000 was targetting (hah) Submarine and AWACS contexts, and this was a huge activity to get ahead of some issues in computing for synthetic radar. (which btw, GEC had some lead in: the work they did in the prior two generations of computing made british radar work world-class which is in part why british materiel sells so well into many armed forces. Also explains why Schlumberger and the like were into the same hardware: synthetic apeture radar is the same problem as Oil Shockwave exploration. Guess which british companies sold to Oil? Ferranti (Argus) and GEC/Plessy) The standing joke about the GEC system was it had a real "halt and catch fire" instruction because thermal management on the CPU was out of hand, and it needed constant monitoring to prevent fire risk in the machine room. The UK also had two rounds of "AI is the solution to every problem" remembering the Whitehill report of the 1970s which preseaged many of the same pushbacks in the 1980s and 1990s on ubiquitous AI: the proponents made far too sweeping claims and got a rap over the knuckles about cost-vs-benefit and sweeping up the money. Alvey made it very hard to fund non-alvey projects. This kind of thing turns collaborative science into competitive science with toxic qualities. Overall, I judge Alvey harshly. BTW I was a very very junior CompSci research programmer: If this stuff leaked into first-job-out-of-Uni level staff, imagine how loud it was around the Professorial table?
omarhaneef 7y ago
I love history as much as the next guy, and this is exciting writing, but the issue I have with this is that we haven’t seen the end. That is to say, AI is an unsolved problem, and we don’t really know what the solution will look like. We are in a (the?) golden age for statistical learning but in the end, symbolic processing and prolog like architecture might turn out to be the key. I will point to someone much smarter than myself — Jerry Fodor — to make the arguments. But basically it amounts to this: intelligence is the ability to reason and our best model for reasoning is linguistic. Okay, he says it much better than I do.
gumby 7y ago
This entertaining essay captures things well without getting distracted by some of the really funny stories, many of which cannot be repeated as the protagonists are still alive. Programming in Japan is typically a low-status job considered a blue collar occupation (Nintendo and SCEI are notable exceptions) despite Japan having produced quite a few globally notable computer scientists. I remember visiting a 5 Gen project om 1984. I was shocked by the open plan office (how did anyone get any work done?). At the row of desks was one ASCII terminal for each two desks (to a KL-20 I assume but can no longer remember). I spoke with one of the developers asking him what he thought of the environment. "Great: I only have to share the terminal with one other person". The next year I myself was employed at MCC in their AI group (they had a database and CAD group, and perhaps one other) working for Doug Lenat and designing the Cyc system (when I got there they were working in Interlisp on Dandelions, not surprisingly as Doug's office had been around the corner from mine at PARC). The first thing I did was toss the Interlisp implementation and redo it on for a 3600. 5Gen and MCC actually were 2 and 3 of another transformational hype effort, the Center Mondial d'Informatique and Ressource Humaine (World Center for Computer Sciences and Human Resources) launched in France in 1983 on the back of an influential book by a major French intellectual, Jean-Jaques Servan-Schreiber. They had a KL-20, a Vax (with a copy of BSD I carried over there in my luggage) and a few CADR Lispms (two or four, I can't remember). With swanky offices in central Paris around the corner from the presidential palace and a lobby full of Apple 2s that anyone could walk in and try out they didn't do much for the third world I'm afraid, idealistic goals notwithstanding, but they did launch quite a few very good computer scientists, so were probably worth the effort. So I worked for CMIRH and MCC, and spent some time at 5Gen. Fun times.
- dreamcompiler 7y ago
  I worked at MCC too, but in the human interface group. It was a lot of fun using Symbolics machines all day (the ultimate brain-to-computer interface). Despite nothing much coming from my work at MCC, I still got to write Lisp and Prolog for pretty much my whole career, and MCC set me on that path. So I'll thank them for that.
  - dcreemer 7y ago
uxp100 7y ago
In japanese pop culture of the 80s and 90s, you see references to 5th gen computing now and then. Just like as a part of the technobabble in some sci-fi show. Watching sci-fi anime once I heard it a few times I started to suspect it might be a real thing, and looked it up. If anyone has a recommendation for a book or long article that covers the this, some of the people involved, what they actually achieved, etc. I'd be interested.
- LargoLasskhyfv 7y ago
  Look at this http://xahlee.info/kbd/TRON_keyboard.html http://xahlee.info/kbd/TRON_keyboard.html Then https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRON_project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRON_project and especially https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BTRON https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BTRON If that is not enough, try http://tronweb.super-nova.co.jp/homepage.html http://tronweb.super-nova.co.jp/homepage.html which is the most comprehensive history of that i can find. In my opinion that is the stuff which influenced sci-fi anime. Imagine... A specification exactly describing a common platform with different levels of capabilites, but not down to the bits, but more like an API, where anybody is free to implement that in whatever way one sees fit, as long as it conforms to the API. Mandatory interoperability between products of different vendors, be it hard- or software. FAST! All networked. All with code at least a magnitude smaller than contemporary counterparts. So no BLOAT. That was the spirit of the time there, i guess. But the powers of Babylon intervened again, i guess.
foobiekr 7y ago
My first degree was in Japanese, mostly because I already knew how to program and had, since I was a home computer kid, been doing so for years. I did a Japanese major because Japan looked like it was going to take over the world in 1989, especially in technology. It was a foolish, foolish decision. However, it gave me a ton of exposure to the 5th generation project, and this article is a wonderful reminder of how crazy it was, though it doesn't quite capture the insane hype around the whole thing. There's an excellent, if imperfect, book called "The Fifth Generation Fallacy" by JM Unger (who, in a weird circumstance that makes me think the writers of our narrative are just plain lazy, a few years later, became the head of the Japanese department I was in) that talks about the project in terms that I think make quite a lot of sense. The book talks about it, but I go even further: the 5th gen project was about Japanese beliefs about information technology and specifically that Japanese was such a complex language that the only way to have working IT was to have an intelligent machine. Japan was still using pencils and xerox machines in the aftermath of the PC revolution in the US and Europe (in practice, this continued into the mid-90s), and had missed mainframes and minis entirely. The idea of a statistically-driven, convenient, modern input mechanism (what people use now when they use an IME, these started to show up in the mid-90s when enough of a corpus was analyzed to make them work) was not there yet; Japanese word processors of that era are incredibly cumbersome and terrible, just barely usable and not usable at all by large swaths of the work force. Japan was absolutely terrified of the technological progress in the rest of the world and a lot of it had (and has) to do with the simple inconvenience of the writing systems and the linguistic isolation. In the cultural context, especially of the bubble that formed at the same time, and no small amount of vaguely racist beliefs about their superiority (especially linguistic, which had been going on for a very long time and played a role in Japanese relations and eventual behavior post-annexation of Korea), the 5th gen project makes perfect sense.
- wrp 7y ago
  Unger's book doesn't get the attention it deserves, maybe because he is a humanities guy. I just wanted to add that response to his book was (predictably) very hostile, much like with Hubert Dreyfus' What Computers Can't Do. Unger offered well-reasoned criticism early in the hype cycle, but it seems to have had no influence on how people responded to the FGCP.
nudpiedo 7y ago
It is so easy to make fun of the failed ones and try to predict the past, but once there were other government projects which ended up working and now we see as obvious right just because we know how history has gone, see for example ARPANET. If the fifth generation would have worked in some degree now it would have some status and if ARPANET would have failed it would have been forgotten.This is how anglosaxon culture often works, making fun and parodies of competitor failures, etc. In other aspects of history the same historical rhetorical approach is often seen.
sgt101 7y ago
>Saying you’re going to build an intelligent talking computer in 1982 or 2019 is much like saying you’re going to fly to the moon or build a web browser in 1492. Alex and Siri do a pretty good job of talking, and are almost up to the task of hearing. They are command and search interfaces only - the "intelligence" in them is very limited (hardly there) but it is clear that there is a jump between 1982 and 2019. These devices do exist and to deny their reality does cast a lot of doubt on the other perspectives presented.
- scottlocklin 7y ago
  Well, you should go read the original 5th gen specs; they're all on file sharing. They were not talking about Siri (which is a terrible example, and something that was basically possible even way back in the 80s using vector quantizers and HMMs). They were talking about Star Trek or Hal-9000 type computers that could understand meaning and do human-like abstract design work beyond "hey google spyware, please turn on the air conditioning."
mark_l_watson 7y ago
Perhaps the author has only worked on simple, predictable outcome, projects but in my experience (personal and in generally observing our industry) failure and restarts are often the path forward to success. I lived through the period of AI in the 1980s, have been a vendor of expert system tools for Lisp machines and the Apple Macintosh, and when MCC was being founded the founder Admiral Bobby Inman gave me a tour of the place. I also joke about the outlandish claims and thought the AI winters were well deserved but I also believe that the state of our field and business now is very good and those rough times in the 1980s and 1990s are what helped get us to where we are today.
kragen 7y ago
> somehow they thought optical databases would allow for image search. It’s not clear what they had in mind here Oh, well, it turns out that focusing a spatially modulated light beam through a lens gives you the Fourier transform of the original spatial modulation at the focal plane. So if your lens has a focal length of 30 cm you can calculate a Fourier transform of an image of whatever size (1024x1024, 2048x2048, 4096x4096) in 1 ns. This is about six or seven orders of magnitude faster than you can do it on a modern CPU core, and still about three orders of magnitude faster than you can do it on a NVIDIA Turing. It was about eleven orders of magnitude faster than you could do it on digital hardware at the time of the Fifth Generation Project. But you lose the phase information (as far as I know) so you can't reverse the process. So what's it good for? Correlation, that's what. If you have a photo of a tank from some angle at some angle and scale, and at some set of phase shifts it has a significant correlation with some other image, that probably means that tank is in that image. You can compute the correlation (disregarding phase, so it's an upper bound rather than the actual correlation) with an electrical SLM, which is slower than the lens but still a lot faster than a VAX. Or an i7. So it was a plausible attack on the problem of image recognition using massively parallel analog computation. It hasn't panned out, but we had to try it to find that out.

86 points by o_nate 7y ago

>> If you want to read about the actual tech they were harping as bringing MUH SWINGULARITY, go read Norvig’s AIMA book. This was still the main AI textbook in 2014 when I did my MSc in the subject. It is what is rightly called a "seminal text" and there is not a single trace of Singularitarianism in it. It's not just "Norvig's book". Its authors are Peter Norvig and Stuart Russel. Is Stuart Russel ignored because he is not at Google? The article really needs to cool down on the hindsight triumphalism. A lot of people were very optimistic about AI in the '80s (as earlier) because significant and continued progress had been made. Scientific progress, the continuation of the work of the Logicians in the '20s and Church and Turing's work in the '30s. Sure, people in the industry just wanted to make a quick buck, as they always do. But interesting science was being done and it is a big loss that the AI winter disrupted its course. Not because it could have led to autonomous vehicles and conversational agents. What we lost in the winter was the opportunity to discover new knowledge. That is a tragedy. So I really don't understand where all the schadenfreude comes from, in the article. A big commercial project failed and took with it a whole branch of computer science. Who, exactly, benefited from this?

gumby 7y ago
> So I really don't understand where all the schadenfreude comes from, in the article. A big commercial project failed and took with it a whole branch of computer science. Who, exactly, benefited from this? It wasn't a big commercial system; it was a big government system (you probably can't imagine the degree of shock and awe that greeted MITI people or even the mention of the minstry in the US). This was when Japan was going to destroy America and goodamnit, Something Must Be Done. Of course as happens with such projects it all comes tumbling down, but usually with a whimper. Apollo is another good example: they hit their goal and then what? 5Gen was the more common case: just wasted away. The schadenfreude comes not just from the central planning hubris but from the American freak-out response to what was really hype and a squib. The author says the same thing is happening today, with the hype-o-meter on 11, again in the AI field, and again with an "asian menace" on the horizon, this time China. 5Gen just rode a hype machine though; it didn't take the field out -- we could all see that coming anyway.
- foobiekr 7y ago
  I think people today have a very hard time understanding what things were like during the Japan bubble from about 1987 to 1990. Coming out of the 1970s Japan ended up dominating certain parts of the electronics - and especially personal electronics, like radios or portable cassette players. They had terribly failed in _information technology_ however, but most people didn't know that, what they saw was walkmen, MITI coordinating wiping out American DRAM and television producers using dumping (among other things) and so on. Another important event was that the US dollar was very high in the mid-1980s (Reagan deliberately de-valuing the dollar was frequent discussion on the morning news). A side effect of this was the transfer of investment to other shores, and Japan being the primary beneficiary. BOJ dropped interest rates a great deal and a speculative asset and property bubble was launched. This culminated in the purchase of many, many high-profile assets in the United States by the Japanese keiretsu and banks. The Japanese were in a mania, and a lot of investors world-wide were as well, and the Americans, in particular, were experiencing a kind of crisis of faith in US-style capitalism. Like most bubbles (try explaining the dotcom), it is very hard to make someone understand what happened. You can recount the facts but not the emotional context.
  - selimthegrim 7y ago
    James Burke had a climate special (After the Warming) in about 1989-90 where his ideal future was the Japanese running things in a world government. Seems to have captured the zeitgeist and the present (creepy to hear the bit in the beginning though about "full-scale evacuation of New Orleans"). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RfE8wBReIxw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RfE8wBReIxw
    - foobiekr 7y ago
      Wow. This is crazy.
      - selimthegrim 7y ago
        His optimism is touching. The bit about carbon trading struck me. Lately I've been questioning the dogma of one man, one vote. What if the only way to democratically resolve climate change is to inversely weight your vote by the amount of carbon you emit?
brighter2morrow 7y ago
>This was still the main AI textbook in 2014 when I did my MSc in the subject FYI seminal books don't rotate in and out over a five year timespan, it is still the seminal book and will likely continue to be given all the fuel being burned on neural networks that generate more heat than light.
- neilv 7y ago
  I had an intro AI class for which Leslie Kaelbling got use of a draft of Russell&Norvig (it was 2 thick stacks of photocopies, with comb bindings), before it became famous. Good call, LPK. Sadly, I donated&sold all my books when I did an extreme-minimalism housing move after grad school, or I'd still own this collector's item.
  - brighter2morrow 7y ago
    Wow that is cool, and I feel bad for you because that would be a cool collector's item! Though to be practical, I do prefer nicely bound and polished publications rather than the photocopied and combly bound.
gumby 7y ago
By the way, though signifying nothing but apropos to this topic: Stuart worked with us at MCC, Peter did not.
api 7y ago
Ragging on things that failed with the benefit of hindsight is a good way to sound smart. I have never liked that genre much. 5gen failed but Apollo, the Manhattan Project, DARPANet, the Bell Labs transistor project, and SpaceX reusable boosters (for a contemporary example) succeeded. This piece argues that the ambitious megaproject successes were more decomposable but I find this rationale to be an unconvincing post-hoc just-so story. The conclusion I draw when I look over the history of innovation is that it's like a rare animal that almost never mates in captivity or one of those exotic fungi we can barely culture. We know how to set up conditions where innovation can happen: get smart people, provide capital, give them an ambitious but not impossible goal. Beyond this it's serendipity. Sometimes the muse pays a visit and sometimes it doesn't. The dynamics seem almost identical to what you see in art and music, and I don't think that's coincidence. Science and engineering are perhaps more like the arts than we tend to think. 5gen probably would never have achieved all its goals, but it might have achieved something really notable had the muse chosen to pay a visit.
- lioeters 7y ago
  This is my favorite comment in this whole thread. Looking back on big failures in history, it's too easy to point out the obvious mistakes or logical reasons why it failed, how unrealistic their dreams were. That narrative doesn't take into account that notable successes in history, major innovations, were born from basically the same ingredients in a shared cultural context. The difference was (at least seemingly) often just a slight chance variation in conditions, being in the right place at the right time, working on an idea that happened to be ready to blossom. I love the parallels you draw with exotic fungi, how sensitive these ambitious ideas are to its environment. There are so many ways it can fail, and the reason for success is often elusive and serendipitous. > Science and engineering are perhaps more like the arts than we tend to think This seems related to how great art and music are often born of a "cultural milieu", like the jazz scene, or Paris cafe culture in the 1920's that fostered poets, painters, musicians. I imagine Xerox PARC was like that, a vibrant intellectual subculture of creative people who worked in the medium of technology. Speaking of the muse, I like the popular expression, "The elves have left Middle Earth." There's a kind of indescribable "magic" that can inhabit a place and time, pulling everyone around under its spell. Then, as mysteriously as it appeared, it's gone - leaving behind relics of wonders, art works or artifacts, that reason alone cannot explain.
Animats 7y ago
One of the hilarious things about 5th generation computers is how certain people were about all this. More like painful. I went through Stanford in the mid-1980s, about when it was clear that expert systems were only marginally useful and strong AI was not around the corner. Many faculty were in serious denial about this. You can write rules for an expert system, and what you get out is pretty much what you put in. Too many rules, and you're likely to have contradictions and the inference system gets confused. The logicians were trying hard to fix that, which generated a lot of papers with obscure notations. Eventually we did get massive parallelism, but it doesn't look anything like the Thinking Machines or LISP machine approach.
kragen 7y ago
I think Locklin is saying that AIMA is a good source for understanding GOFAI, and that GOFAI was touted as on the verge of achieving AGI, not that AIMA touted GOFAI as being on the verge of achieving AGI. I agree with your distaste for the self-congratulatory tone.

ggm 7y ago

"I had friends on that deathstar" basically: I was working in the UK JANET community, with people I knew doing Alvey project funded 5th Generation work. The projects had a very strong "catch up or we will loose the war" feel to them, because the Japanese were pumping money into things which made ICL, Olivetti,Ci-Honeywell-Bull,Ferranti,GEC very nervous. Domestic-Strategic outcomes vested in having strong world-comparable computing manufacturing: What if they "out thought us" The one I can remember (from 40 years distance) is the GEC4000 project in Newcastle University, which included GEC-Plessy, Newcastle and York and Glasgow University, in a joint computing project. the GEC4000 was targetting (hah) Submarine and AWACS contexts, and this was a huge activity to get ahead of some issues in computing for synthetic radar. (which btw, GEC had some lead in: the work they did in the prior two generations of computing made british radar work world-class which is in part why british materiel sells so well into many armed forces. Also explains why Schlumberger and the like were into the same hardware: synthetic apeture radar is the same problem as Oil Shockwave exploration. Guess which british companies sold to Oil? Ferranti (Argus) and GEC/Plessy) The standing joke about the GEC system was it had a real "halt and catch fire" instruction because thermal management on the CPU was out of hand, and it needed constant monitoring to prevent fire risk in the machine room. The UK also had two rounds of "AI is the solution to every problem" remembering the Whitehill report of the 1970s which preseaged many of the same pushbacks in the 1980s and 1990s on ubiquitous AI: the proponents made far too sweeping claims and got a rap over the knuckles about cost-vs-benefit and sweeping up the money. Alvey made it very hard to fund non-alvey projects. This kind of thing turns collaborative science into competitive science with toxic qualities. Overall, I judge Alvey harshly. BTW I was a very very junior CompSci research programmer: If this stuff leaked into first-job-out-of-Uni level staff, imagine how loud it was around the Professorial table?

omarhaneef 7y ago

I love history as much as the next guy, and this is exciting writing, but the issue I have with this is that we haven’t seen the end. That is to say, AI is an unsolved problem, and we don’t really know what the solution will look like. We are in a (the?) golden age for statistical learning but in the end, symbolic processing and prolog like architecture might turn out to be the key. I will point to someone much smarter than myself — Jerry Fodor — to make the arguments. But basically it amounts to this: intelligence is the ability to reason and our best model for reasoning is linguistic. Okay, he says it much better than I do.

gumby 7y ago

This entertaining essay captures things well without getting distracted by some of the really funny stories, many of which cannot be repeated as the protagonists are still alive. Programming in Japan is typically a low-status job considered a blue collar occupation (Nintendo and SCEI are notable exceptions) despite Japan having produced quite a few globally notable computer scientists. I remember visiting a 5 Gen project om 1984. I was shocked by the open plan office (how did anyone get any work done?). At the row of desks was one ASCII terminal for each two desks (to a KL-20 I assume but can no longer remember). I spoke with one of the developers asking him what he thought of the environment. "Great: I only have to share the terminal with one other person". The next year I myself was employed at MCC in their AI group (they had a database and CAD group, and perhaps one other) working for Doug Lenat and designing the Cyc system (when I got there they were working in Interlisp on Dandelions, not surprisingly as Doug's office had been around the corner from mine at PARC). The first thing I did was toss the Interlisp implementation and redo it on for a 3600. 5Gen and MCC actually were 2 and 3 of another transformational hype effort, the Center Mondial d'Informatique and Ressource Humaine (World Center for Computer Sciences and Human Resources) launched in France in 1983 on the back of an influential book by a major French intellectual, Jean-Jaques Servan-Schreiber. They had a KL-20, a Vax (with a copy of BSD I carried over there in my luggage) and a few CADR Lispms (two or four, I can't remember). With swanky offices in central Paris around the corner from the presidential palace and a lobby full of Apple 2s that anyone could walk in and try out they didn't do much for the third world I'm afraid, idealistic goals notwithstanding, but they did launch quite a few very good computer scientists, so were probably worth the effort. So I worked for CMIRH and MCC, and spent some time at 5Gen. Fun times.

dreamcompiler 7y ago
I worked at MCC too, but in the human interface group. It was a lot of fun using Symbolics machines all day (the ultimate brain-to-computer interface). Despite nothing much coming from my work at MCC, I still got to write Lisp and Prolog for pretty much my whole career, and MCC set me on that path. So I'll thank them for that.
- dcreemer 7y ago

uxp100 7y ago

In japanese pop culture of the 80s and 90s, you see references to 5th gen computing now and then. Just like as a part of the technobabble in some sci-fi show. Watching sci-fi anime once I heard it a few times I started to suspect it might be a real thing, and looked it up. If anyone has a recommendation for a book or long article that covers the this, some of the people involved, what they actually achieved, etc. I'd be interested.

LargoLasskhyfv 7y ago
Look at this http://xahlee.info/kbd/TRON_keyboard.html http://xahlee.info/kbd/TRON_keyboard.html Then https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRON_project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRON_project and especially https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BTRON https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BTRON If that is not enough, try http://tronweb.super-nova.co.jp/homepage.html http://tronweb.super-nova.co.jp/homepage.html which is the most comprehensive history of that i can find. In my opinion that is the stuff which influenced sci-fi anime. Imagine... A specification exactly describing a common platform with different levels of capabilites, but not down to the bits, but more like an API, where anybody is free to implement that in whatever way one sees fit, as long as it conforms to the API. Mandatory interoperability between products of different vendors, be it hard- or software. FAST! All networked. All with code at least a magnitude smaller than contemporary counterparts. So no BLOAT. That was the spirit of the time there, i guess. But the powers of Babylon intervened again, i guess.

foobiekr 7y ago

My first degree was in Japanese, mostly because I already knew how to program and had, since I was a home computer kid, been doing so for years. I did a Japanese major because Japan looked like it was going to take over the world in 1989, especially in technology. It was a foolish, foolish decision. However, it gave me a ton of exposure to the 5th generation project, and this article is a wonderful reminder of how crazy it was, though it doesn't quite capture the insane hype around the whole thing. There's an excellent, if imperfect, book called "The Fifth Generation Fallacy" by JM Unger (who, in a weird circumstance that makes me think the writers of our narrative are just plain lazy, a few years later, became the head of the Japanese department I was in) that talks about the project in terms that I think make quite a lot of sense. The book talks about it, but I go even further: the 5th gen project was about Japanese beliefs about information technology and specifically that Japanese was such a complex language that the only way to have working IT was to have an intelligent machine. Japan was still using pencils and xerox machines in the aftermath of the PC revolution in the US and Europe (in practice, this continued into the mid-90s), and had missed mainframes and minis entirely. The idea of a statistically-driven, convenient, modern input mechanism (what people use now when they use an IME, these started to show up in the mid-90s when enough of a corpus was analyzed to make them work) was not there yet; Japanese word processors of that era are incredibly cumbersome and terrible, just barely usable and not usable at all by large swaths of the work force. Japan was absolutely terrified of the technological progress in the rest of the world and a lot of it had (and has) to do with the simple inconvenience of the writing systems and the linguistic isolation. In the cultural context, especially of the bubble that formed at the same time, and no small amount of vaguely racist beliefs about their superiority (especially linguistic, which had been going on for a very long time and played a role in Japanese relations and eventual behavior post-annexation of Korea), the 5th gen project makes perfect sense.

wrp 7y ago
Unger's book doesn't get the attention it deserves, maybe because he is a humanities guy. I just wanted to add that response to his book was (predictably) very hostile, much like with Hubert Dreyfus' What Computers Can't Do. Unger offered well-reasoned criticism early in the hype cycle, but it seems to have had no influence on how people responded to the FGCP.

nudpiedo 7y ago

It is so easy to make fun of the failed ones and try to predict the past, but once there were other government projects which ended up working and now we see as obvious right just because we know how history has gone, see for example ARPANET. If the fifth generation would have worked in some degree now it would have some status and if ARPANET would have failed it would have been forgotten.This is how anglosaxon culture often works, making fun and parodies of competitor failures, etc. In other aspects of history the same historical rhetorical approach is often seen.

sgt101 7y ago

>Saying you’re going to build an intelligent talking computer in 1982 or 2019 is much like saying you’re going to fly to the moon or build a web browser in 1492. Alex and Siri do a pretty good job of talking, and are almost up to the task of hearing. They are command and search interfaces only - the "intelligence" in them is very limited (hardly there) but it is clear that there is a jump between 1982 and 2019. These devices do exist and to deny their reality does cast a lot of doubt on the other perspectives presented.

scottlocklin 7y ago
Well, you should go read the original 5th gen specs; they're all on file sharing. They were not talking about Siri (which is a terrible example, and something that was basically possible even way back in the 80s using vector quantizers and HMMs). They were talking about Star Trek or Hal-9000 type computers that could understand meaning and do human-like abstract design work beyond "hey google spyware, please turn on the air conditioning."

mark_l_watson 7y ago

Perhaps the author has only worked on simple, predictable outcome, projects but in my experience (personal and in generally observing our industry) failure and restarts are often the path forward to success. I lived through the period of AI in the 1980s, have been a vendor of expert system tools for Lisp machines and the Apple Macintosh, and when MCC was being founded the founder Admiral Bobby Inman gave me a tour of the place. I also joke about the outlandish claims and thought the AI winters were well deserved but I also believe that the state of our field and business now is very good and those rough times in the 1980s and 1990s are what helped get us to where we are today.

kragen 7y ago

> somehow they thought optical databases would allow for image search. It’s not clear what they had in mind here Oh, well, it turns out that focusing a spatially modulated light beam through a lens gives you the Fourier transform of the original spatial modulation at the focal plane. So if your lens has a focal length of 30 cm you can calculate a Fourier transform of an image of whatever size (1024x1024, 2048x2048, 4096x4096) in 1 ns. This is about six or seven orders of magnitude faster than you can do it on a modern CPU core, and still about three orders of magnitude faster than you can do it on a NVIDIA Turing. It was about eleven orders of magnitude faster than you could do it on digital hardware at the time of the Fifth Generation Project. But you lose the phase information (as far as I know) so you can't reverse the process. So what's it good for? Correlation, that's what. If you have a photo of a tank from some angle at some angle and scale, and at some set of phase shifts it has a significant correlation with some other image, that probably means that tank is in that image. You can compute the correlation (disregarding phase, so it's an upper bound rather than the actual correlation) with an electrical SLM, which is slower than the lens but still a lot faster than a VAX. Or an i7. So it was a plausible attack on the problem of image recognition using massively parallel analog computation. It hasn't panned out, but we had to try it to find that out.