ACM president's letter: the challenge of the fifth generation

"It is no secret that the Japanese have targeted the computer industry as a critical strategic business for the rest of the century" [1]. In line with this strategy, the Japanese government has launched the Fifth Generation Computer Project. This wellfunded project--reportedly in excess of $500,000,000--has generated considerable interest and excitement and clearly threatens the West's technical supremacy in computer technology. The competition has all the allure of the Newton-Leibnitz controversy over the discovery of the calculus-but, alas, in this case, it does matter who gets there first. The project has the goal of developing, by the end of the decade, revolutionary computer systems that incorporate and exploit the concepts of artificial intelligence (AI). The new systems will have problem-solving functions; sophisticated man-machine interfaces; inference and knowledge-based expert functions. Under this project, innovative computer architectures, perhaps substantially different from traditional von Neumann machines, will be investigated. These new problem-solving architectures, along with the general systems development, will enable the Japanese to "cultivate information itself as a new resource comparable to food and energy" [2]. More directly, they believe "the time has come for Japan to change strat-