Techniques and Methodology

In October 1981,.Japan announced a national project to develop highly innovative computer systems for the 199Os, with the title "Fifth Generation Computer Systems " This paper is a personal view of that project, its significance, and reactions to it. The informatiou available to me at the time of writing (June 1982) is not as complete as I would have liked, a.nd Prcscnted at the Pergarnon Infotcch State of the Art Conference on "Japan and the Fifth Generation " in London, England, 27-29 Septemher 1982 Technical Note 265 I apologise for any mistakes or misinterpretations I may therefore have made. ETL and, in particular, to Kazuhiro includes "expert systems" and natural language interfaces. Thus VLSI technology is to be exploited to build advanced parallel architectures for AItype applications, where the basic machine language will be an extension of the logic programming language Prolog. So logic programming and Prolog play a crucial role in the systems envisaged.