Edward Feigenbaum and Japan’s Fifth Generation AI Vision

As part of honoring pioneering efforts that shaped the global development of Artificial Intelligence, the AIWS History of AI House proudly features the seminal work of Professor Edward Feigenbaum, a distinguished member of the AIWS History of AI.

📘 Featured Work:

“The Fifth Generation: Artificial Intelligence and Japan’s Computer Challenge to the World”
By Edward Feigenbaum and Pamela McCorduck

This landmark book chronicles Japan’s bold vision in the early 1980s to lead the world into a new era of intelligent computing. It captures the ambition, innovation, and global ripple effects of Japan’s Fifth Generation Computer Systems (FGCS) project—a national initiative launched in 1982 by Japan’s Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI).

🧠 Research Contribution:

“A Japanese National Fifth Generation Project: Introduction, Survey, and Evaluation”
By Edward Feigenbaum and Howard Shrobe
Published from the Knowledge Systems Laboratory at Stanford University and MIT’s AI Lab, this academic paper provides a detailed technical and strategic overview of the FGCS project.

Key Highlights:

• The FGCS project aimed to build intelligent systems for societal and economic use, supported by advanced hardware and logic programming.
• It focused on developing Sequential (PSI) and Parallel (PIM) Inference Machines, capable of achieving 150 million logical inferences per second.
• The project championed Prolog-based logic programming, culminating in the construction of a high-performance logic system (XLI).
• However, the initiative faced challenges in adoption due to limited real-world application deployment and reliance on non-mainstream programming approaches.

Despite its eventual limitations, the FGCS project remains a historically significant milestone—representing one of the first nationally coordinated efforts to industrialize AI. It laid critical groundwork for the rise of knowledge systems, logic-based inference machines, and AI’s integration into economic strategy.

Professor Edward Feigenbaum and Nguyen Anh Tuan