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While it's certainly interesting to read about this sort of thing - and I'm interesting in all the computer history - it's worth pointing out that some very large percentage of all computer systems, from every country and every era failed.

So it would be a mistake to read too much into this project being Japanese, or indeed criticize their goals and failures. Like all of their contemporaries they boldly went where no-one had gone before, and like the vast majority of their contemporaries (and most everyone since) discovered limitations in both the technology of the day, and their own abilities.

The important thing is not that they failed. The important thing is that they tried.

Yeah until we got a sort of core dominant systems, late 90s? There were a lot of creative attempts at new systems and ideas. They were either going to surpass the existing systems or fall on their face entirely.

>So it would be a mistake to read too much into this project being Japanese,

As a Japanese(-American) I can tell you why this project failed and more broadly why Japan's computer industry has failed outside of vidja gaemz (and that too is on its way out).

So why did the Japanese fail? It's very simple: Lack of cooperation. The article describes the project "was a collaborative effort of the Japanese computer industry" but the results could not put any more mud on that thought.

Japanese companies HATE cooperating, they will not create nor utilize common standards nor share knowledge with each other. Japanese companies will strive at every turn to create a captive market, hoping that once you've set foot in their little quagmire you will stay stuck with them.

If you ever wondered why Canon camera lenses do not work on Nikon cameras and vice versa, why Kenwood microphones do not work with ICOM radios and vice versa, why Sony insisted on Memory Stick over SD card, why Toshiba threw out NAND flash technology, and so on then this is why. Try naming even a single international industrial standard to come out of Japan, you probably can't and I don't blame you. Sharing is not in Japan's DNA.

Contrast the US computer industry where our companies besides Apple can and will cooperate to create and utilize common standards and push the market wider and forwards. PCI is a foremost example, but the very foundation of the industry is built on IBM PC-compatibles.

All this means Japan will always be stuck with a bunch of small, individual pies nobody will care about, losing to the rest of the west who cooperate (and nowadays China who force entire industries at gunpoint) for a much bigger pie. You can't win when you're all trying to drag each other down in a zero sum game.

> Japan's computer industry has failed outside of vidja gaemz

Worth noting that the big video game companies in Japan—Nintendo, Sony, Square Soft, etc. are atypical Japanese companies too, run a bit differently than the others. Which is no doubt a big reason for their success.

Sorry, but I am skeptical of your argument that Japanese companies are any less cooperative or more avaricious than companies from other countries.

I am aware of several examples that directly contradict your argument:

- JIS screwdrivers.

- Really, JIS anything.

- MSX computers.

- FourThirds/MicroFourThirds.

And there’s a practical reason for camera brands to have different mounts: different camera systems have different flange distances! You’ll even see multiple mounts within the same brand as the line evolves, as seen with the transition from Minolta/Sony A mount to E mount.

OT but flange focal distance is overmystified. It's just a mechanical interfacing spec.

You can't drill a hole on the sensor and mount lens body on it, and lenses must be placed at exactly focal distance away for parallel beams to converge on film or farther for diverging beam(from non-infinitely-far objects), so body designers pass a distance measurement from film to a known feature(mounting ring top surface) to be able to design a lens barrel. That's the flange-focal distance, sort of a "design length of body" to subtract from your overall lens barrel length.

It's actually possible to drill a hole on the PCB and woodscrewing lens directly on in cases with webcams and CCTV cameras, and in those cases the distance is 0.

What do you attribute this to?

Japanese corporate culture has historically been defined by extreme loyalty - salarymen were recruited directly from university and were promised a job for life. Promotion was overwhelmingly from within and based substantially on seniority, with a steep power gradient.

If you were trying to design a system to produce proprietary silos, you'd struggle to beat large Japanese corporations circa 1980.

You might well be 100% right. I'd like to see the Japanese succeed, actually.

However, it was simply not possible for anyone to succeed at AI in the early 80's. It took some Nobel-prize-winning software, a change of approach, and a massive increase in compute power to finally break through.

The only thing we needed was the compute. Everything else had been discovered by the 80s.

Using neural nets. The approach taken towards AI in the 80’s was much less compute intensive.

Neural nets with hidden layers is literally older than the Apollo 11 landing. That doesn't make sense but it is.

Read TFA. The Fifth Generation Project involved expert systems & prolog, not neural nets.

Related. Others?

Fifth-Generation Programming Language - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36080365 - May 2023 (1 comment)

The Fifth Generation Computing Project - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20569098 - July 2019 (49 comments)

'Fifth Generation' Became Japan's Lost Generation (1992) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16630174 - March 2018 (47 comments)

The Fifth Generation Computer Project in Japan - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8256961 - Sept 2014 (3 comments)

Its not a coincidence that the Japanese Economy imploded around the same time. If your country has 40% of global corporate market cap value and then it drops to 8% after an asset bubble bursts, how many ambitious long term projects you can sustain drops too. The US came really close to following the same trajectory with the 2008 bubble bursting. If the banks hadn't been kept afloat and there were alternatives to Wall St a large chunk of the tech sector would have tanked or moved out. There is no global tech leadership possible, if there is no global Finance domination.

>a large chunk of the tech sector would have tanked or moved out

Where exactly would the tech sector have moved to? There's no other country that's really able to absorb high-skill immigrants the way American can and put them to work in that field.

> Where exactly would the tech sector have moved to

It would have been much more decentralized.

Entire generations of Indian, Korean, Chinese, Canadian, Israeli, and European origin founders and executives helped build the US tech industry.

Heck, a lot of prominent Chinese and Indian startups got their start due to the GFC era layoffs and hiring freezes in the tech industry.

Look at Flipkart and Ola in India, ByteDance in China, and Coupang in SK/US for example

COVID and the recent layoffs had a similar impact on the startup scene as well.

>Entire generations of Indian, Korean, Chinese, Canadian, and European origin founders and executives helped build the US tech industry.

Yes, but they would not have built such companies if they were stuck in their own countries. There's a reason they left those countries. Europe, for instance, is notorious for being extremely unfriendly to startups.

>Look at Flipkart and Ola in India and ByteDance in China for example

I've never even heard of the Indian companies here. As for ByteDance, TikTok is likely to be banned in the US and maybe elsewhere because it seems to be a tool for the CCP. It would be difficult to impossible for any Chinese tech company to achieve the status of Google or Microsoft for this reason. Companies in these countries may be able to do well inside their own countries, but they can never achieve real global dominance.

Israel is a definite exception. It is very startup friendly. Just a small market compared to Europe, let alone the US.

I wouldn't call Israel Europe - it's a night and day difference from Europe, plus that undercuts the Sephardim, Mizrahi, Druze, and Israeli Arab contributions to Israel.

Also, buses actually works in Europe :p

But yes, the startup scene is strong in Israel, and that's thanks to the Israeli diaspora in SV and Boston funding startups in Israel in the 2000s - especially Nir Zuk of Palo Alto Networks and much of the team at Akamai.

> There's a reason they left those countries

Pay and upskilling. But domestic tech salaries have risen across Asia now, and the US has gotten much harder to immigrate to.

Most people who joined the tech industry in the US from China and India in the 2000s felt they were getting a bum deal at the time in those countries because of a lack of domestic options, but that's changed since 2008 - especially after the 2008-10 layoffs (I remember those - they were scary, lots of my middle school friends had to move back to China and India because their parents lost their H1B or EB1/2 sponsor).

The next generation of Chinese and Indian startups are now being founded by former diaspora members after the hiring freezes during COVID.

> I've never even heard of the Indian companies here. for ByteDance

That's on you tbh. Not everyone is expected to follow every industry trend per country, but these are all unicorns or exited unicorns that were founded by cohorts in the late 2000s who had the option to move abroad but chose to remain in their own countries.

ByteDance for example had PMF in China well before it entered America as "TikTok", and Flipkart generated $7B a revenue a year - which isn't shabby by Indian or even American standards.

> Companies in these countries may be able to do well inside their own countries, but they can never achieve real global dominance

First, Big Tech (FAANG) is not representative of the tech industry as a whole, and does not have strong PMF in plenty of markets and sectors abroad.

Secondly, this also underestimates the fact that most tech companies have strategy and R&D making parts of their organizations abroad now.

Plenty of NLP work that became LLMs came out of research done in Microsoft China and India, Google Pay's development org is largely in India, Apple's R&D labs in China and India played a major role in developing the manufacturing process and chip design respectively for the iPhone, etc.

>First, Big Tech (FAANG) is not representative of the tech industry as a whole, and does not have strong PMF in plenty of markets and sectors abroad.

It's not? Android is the most popular OS in the world with Apple and Microsoft making up the bulk of the rest.

>As of September 2024, Android, a mobile OS that uses the Linux kernel, has 45.38% of the global market and is the world's most widely used operating system. This is followed by Windows with 25.61%, iOS with 18.39%, macOS with 5.53%, and Desktop Linux with 1.64%.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_syste...

Depends segment to segment and sector to sector.

Take instant messaging as an example.

In the US, iMessage and FB Messenger are fairly prominent messaging services.

Yet in Japan+Taiwan+Thailand it's Line, in Korea it's KakaoTalk, in Vietnam it's Zalo, in China it's WeChat, etc.

Furthermore, the entire publicly listed tech industry globally generates around $6T in revenue, but FAANG represents only $1.4T in revenue. The other $4.6T are spread across multiple decently large companies globally.

In addition, the stereotypical big tech companies are NOT market leaders in plenty of very large market tech sectors. For example, Cybersecurity, ERP, Payment Processing, CRMs, etc.

Big Tech is big, but the world is big as well. There are plenty of markets where a regional competitor or a specialized player can outcompeting big tech. For example, look at Coupang and Flipkart decimating Amazon in SK and India.

Big Tech is big, but it is not an end-all.

>In the US, iMessage and FB Messenger are fairly prominent messaging services. >Yet in Japan+Taiwan+Thailand it's Line, in Korea it's KakaoTalk, in Vietnam it's Zalo, in China it's WeChat, etc.

Notice how none of those companies in the second line have anything close to a globally dominant position? They're only popular locally. LINE is probably the best here since it's dominant in more than 1 country, unlike the others. Meanwhile, people all around the world use Facebook (though this is falling off lately admittedly). If you want to chat with friends in another country, FB Messenger is probably the go-to chat app for this; your friends in Europe or the US aren't going to be using LINE or KakaoTalk if you live in Japan or Korea, and pretty much no one outside the US/Canada uses SMS messaging (and thus iMessage) for talking to friends/family.

>Furthermore, the entire publicly listed tech industry globally generates around $6T in revenue, but FAANG represents only $1.4T in revenue.

MAMAA (because of Microsoft) builds the infrastructure most of the tech industry is built on. This infrastructure isn't going to come from China; no one in the western-aligned nations would trust infrastructure tech from there.

>look at Coupang and Flipkart decimating Amazon in SK and India.

Inside their own countries, sure, just like KakaoTalk dominating Korea. But just like KT, they have no exposure outside their countries. Amazon is huge not just in the US, but many other countries: Canada, various European countries, Japan, etc.

No, the Japanese implosion came at the end of the 80's and early 90's. That book is from 1982.

GP is saying the USian tech industry nearly shared the same fate after our bubble burst in 2008

If you happen to click the link at the bottom of the page "HOME PAGE OF applet-magic" like I did, you get one of the fake virus web sites. Just do Ctrl-Alt-Del (on Windows), select Task Manager, sort on Name if you have to, right click on Google Chrome (or whatever your web browser is), and choose End Task. Or just cold start your computer.

But hey lets keep web sites with links like that off Hacker News, what do you say?

It's a long expired domain that originally belonged to that SJSU professor, I doubt he will ever update the links on these articles. That doesn't negate the value of the article itself.

A hundred dollar bill crawling with Ebola virus is still worth a hundred dollars, yes. But I would really prefer if nobody tried to hand it to me.

That page did absolutely nothing with JS off; just shows a blank page. Now I know it's not worth turning JS on for either, like the majority of the stuff I come across.

The title is somewhat intriguing but the content is extremely light, and on top contains this:

  <!-- ZoneLabs Privacy Insertion -->
  <script language='javascript' src='http://127.0.0.1:1026/js.cgi?pcaw&r=14945'></script>

tbh the Wikipedia article is a lot better https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_Generation_Computer_Syst...

IIUC, the Fifth Generation Computer project was more of James Bond style hallucination than something worthwhile. The project was supposed to produce a completely novel tech stack from hardware to user interface, one such that leapfrog and obsolete all conventional computer systems: it would run on custom AI-optimized parallel CPU designed for a futuristic post-C parallel programming language for all-custom AI inference OS and applications. It was of course all proudly national made with all kinds of scientific theories and inputs from scholars worldwide incorporated into it.

It's like trying to make Star Wars technologies happen by sheer cash flow and technological optimism. All fever dreams.

I gotta side with anigbrowl - the Wikipedia page[1] on the Fifth Generation Project is a much better read than this article. I'd encourage anyone interested in this topic to give it a look. For even more detail, consult the Feigenbaum & McCorduck book[2] mentioned by AlbertCory. It's a very interesting story.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_Generation_Computer_Syst...

[2]: https://www.amazon.com/Fifth-Generation-Artificial-Intellige...

Recently came across this video which goes into history of Japanese computers by Asianometry https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CEtgzO-Im8w

This project was attempting to spin up relatively exotic hardware and software concurrently. The Lisp folks had less exotic software already more or less established but attempted to spin up corresponding hardware. The 5th generation project failed faster due to its greater ambition. Both failed ultimately due to commodity hardware greatly outpacing the ability of exotic hardware to keep up.

If only the Japanese had been willing to make some of our companies' devices for cheap, then they would have found out that we'd be perfectly willing to ship them all of our IP for the promise of a good quarterly earnings call, regardless of what it'd do to our nation's economic and political future.

Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41872982

What would have been the expected 5th gen computer? An OS with natural language prompt instead of command prompt? So, we finally made it with LLMs.

There’s a somewhat heterodox theory that rather than some kind of AI moonshot, the Fifth Generation project was an attempt to build an alternative interaction model to Latin alphabet keyboards feeding teletypes. The idea (supposedly) was that ideographically centered Japan could not compete in a software market dominated by alphanumeric text I/O; “smarter” systems that could leverage arbitrary natural language (written or spoken) would level the playing field.

I agree with your assessment. Through the 1980's, corporate Japan seemed to be on a more cooperative path. However, there were major changes during that decade. It's difficult to pinpoint any particular cause, but I think it can be linked to the decline of MITI's influence. MITI was a key to Japan's dominant role leading up to the 1990's.

I believe that MITI's success made it a political target, and politics can kill anything. My friends from MITI tended to share a similar opinion.

It's somewhat appalling that they don't mention that there's a book with this title:

https://www.amazon.com/Fifth-Generation-Artificial-Intellige...

As for "The important thing is that they tried" : would you give them credit for "trying" to invent real-time, neuron-by-neuron brain imaging, in 1982? And giving billions of taxpayer Yen to the effort? How about quantum computers?

Or would you have been justified in saying that there are projects with a better prospect of success right now, and we shouldn't waste the taxpayers' money on things guaranteed to fail?

So what ARE your limits? Or are there any?

As for "The important thing is that they tried" : would you give them credit for "trying" to invent real-time, neuron-by-neuron brain imaging, in 1982? And giving billions of taxpayer Yen to the effort? How about quantum computers?

For me, I'd say:

1. Yes

2. Taxation is theft

3. Yes

Or would you have been justified in saying that there are projects with a better prospect of success right now, and we shouldn't waste the taxpayers' money on things guaranteed to fail?

See again: taxation is theft. But regardless of how you fund research, it remains the case that "you don't know what you don't know" and "hindsight is 20/20". I'm certainly not going to slag the Japanese for the effort they put into the 5th gen project just because things didn't work out as favorably as they might have.

And also, while the project might not have met their immediate goals and is deemed a "failure" that doesn't necessarily mean that the research they did is value-less. Speaking for myself, I actually recently went on a bit of a buying binge, buying a bunch of books on the 5th gen project (read that Feigenbaum & McCorduck book ages ago) and related ideas (eg, concurrent prolog). Because I have a hunch there's a kernel of something useful there still waiting to emerge. Now my research may lead me nowhere, but that's OK. And at least in my case I'm spending only my own money.

Let me just repeat: So what ARE your limits? Or are there any?

So I guess you're saying there are no limits? Every project should be funded to the max?

and since you're against taxation, does that mean ordinary people are to be compelled to "voluntarily" fund them? Or where is the money supposed to come from?

and since you're against taxation, does that mean ordinary people are to be compelled to "voluntarily" fund them? Or where is the money supposed to come from?

Honestly, not interested in going any deeper on this topic here on HN. It won't lead to anything productive and will just start a flamewar. In the off chance that you are actually especially interested in hearing my opinion(s) here, drop me an email at prhodes@fogbeam.com and we can continue there. If not, then I'm satisfied to drop this here.

You made some nonsensical statements on HN, and now you're dropping out rather than trying to defend them. Got it.

I offered to continue the dialog. You decided to go for the "zinger" approach. I think that tells us both all we need to know about the merits of me continuing this little dialog with you. Have a nice day.

It's like binary system was "invented" like 300 years before it actually has been used, most likely the Japanese idea will actually happen at some point, just that when they were trying to develop it, the technology was not advanced enough for it.

> The Japanese Fifth Generation project was a collaborative effort of the Japanese computer industry coordinated by the Japanese Government

> In a sense, Japan's ability to stay the course in pursuit of a long-term payoff-- usually considered one of the country's strongest assets-- turned into a liability.

Japan is an expert at public-private partnerships. Their entire economic development story was based on the government and private enterprises working together. They didn't take an ideological approach to development. They ignored both the neoliberal route and the socialist route.

Well, they’re certainly very good at favoritism, which is basically what the keiretsu-led model ended up being. And favoritism and picking winners only really works as long as you’re able to pick the right winners.

This model works well to supercharge initial growth if done correctly, but eventually you can’t really become richer through exports alone and have to pivot towards more consumption, which can be difficult to pull off.