The Fifth Generation Computer Systems (FGCS) was an initiative by

Japan's Ministry of International Trade and Industry(MITI), begun in 1982, to

create a computer using massively parallel computing/processing. It was to be
the 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 to provide a platform for future
developments in artificial intelligence. There was also an unrelated Russian
project also named as a fifth-generation computer (see Kronos (computer))...

In his "Trip Report" paper,[1] Prof. Ehud Shapiro (which focused the FGCS
project on concurrent logic programming as the software foundation for the
project) captured the rationale and motivations driving this huge project:

"As part of Japan's effort to become a leader in the computer industry, the
Institute for New Generation Computer Technology has launched a
revolutionary ten-year plan for the development of large computer systems
which will be applicable to knowledge information processing systems. These
Fifth Generation computers will be built around the concepts of logic
programming. In order to refute the accusation that Japan exploits knowledge
from abroad without contributing any of its own, this project will stimulate
original research and will make its results available to the international
research community."

The term "fifth generation" was intended to convey the system as being a leap
beyond existing machines. In the history of computing hardware, computers
using vacuum tubes were called the first generation; transistors and diodes,
the second; integrated circuits, 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