I personally still see a future there, Von Neumaan has only taken us so far. We need alternate CPU designs.
In the end, it proved difficult to implement clause invocation in these languages as efficiently as procedure invocation in object-oriented programming languages. The combination of efficient inheritance-based procedure invocation together with class libraries and browsers was better than the slower pattern-directed clause invocation of the FGCS programming languages, so concurrent object-oriented message-passing languages like Java and C# became the mainstream.
I would suggest that the relational database approach is simpler and about as powerful as the rule-based approach to knowledge processing. From a practical point of view, any row of a Relatonal DataBase System table can be considered as a rule, provided that at least one attribute has been selected as an output.
Parallel machines weren't a great idea in the early 90s, because you could barely get one decent CPU on a chip and adding memory turned it into a large board per core. Now you can have satisfying numbers of CPUs plus memory on a single chip, and even a useful prototype on an FPGA.
Sound familiar? Thankfully history doesn’t repeat itself with another Asian country going all in on AI with a scary huge real estate bubble.
* Sense that they will rule the world
* Incredibly bubbly real estate market
* Exporting this bubble to North America west coast
* Huge bets on AI
* Zombie companies (SOEs)
* Rapidly aging worforce
Yes, there are some difference, China is much larger than Japan but it is also much poorer than Japan (on a per capita basis). The country as a whole isn't that well educated (compulsory education only goes to 9th grade, extremely uneven resources applied to rural areas and different cities).
Who knows how this will play off, I'm guessing a China crash will be much worse in scale than Japan coming down in the late 80s/early 90s, but China will also be able to recover much more quickly after it happens given there is still room for development.
How many Chinese are meaningfully in the present? As I understood it, there was still a non-trivial population living in a less-than-modern way.
Here's a model that I'll use to back up that idea:
Top 5 US CSAs: NY, LA, Chicago, DC, SF Bay Area: 70.8 million people.
Top 5 Chinese Metro Areas: Guangzhou, Shanghai, Chongqing, Beijing, Hangzhou: 149 million.
Chinese municipalities are complicated. Even Beijing is about half rural.
And if we take in the half rural estimate, that'd already put it at 1 to 1 today (with lots of room for growth).
Agreed that Chongqing is fairly different (since it's forced "urbanization" due to the Three Gorges Dam). But I've heard a lot of people say Beijing and Shanghai make NYC look "small" in comparison.
Even LA and NY have lots of parts that many Americans may not consider as living "meaningfully in the present" from the point of view being able to work on advanced projects like "Fifth Generation" computing.
I could have put it clearer, but my understanding was that China still has a non-trivial population that is not involved in the "advanced economy," in a way that would surprise most Americans. That is, subsistence farming, less-than high school education, etc.
Given the historical circumstances, I'll be he would prefer they were trying to build a parallel Lisp machine.
The interesting point, though, was that the specific goals were not clearly related to the fundamental reasons for doing it. And as it turned out, most of the research topics (but not all, IIRC) were really boosted by work in graphics co-processors.
As to the 5th generation computer project, what little I've read so far has more or less convinced me that special-purpose processors will never be better than general-purpose ones, at least not for general-purpose computing (which, ultimately, was the aim of the project).
I'm saying that as a dyed-in-the-wool symbolist btw (and a long-time Prolog user). Special-purpose processors to make my Prolog go faster is something I'd love to get my hands on- but, for most people? I think it's not even number 1000 in their list of priorities ot improve computing performance.
There was a lot of research for AI hardware in the 80s and also for Prolog hardware. I once saw a Japanese Prolog Machine (a special purpose workstation with a Prolog environment), but I didn't have the chance to actually use it.
With faster/cheaper Intel or RISC processors and a lack of research funding, the topic of specialized hardware was mostly ending in the early 90s.
On the other hand, according to the tech press at the time, the Japanese were going to eat our lunch. Put us all out of work. Rule the world with an iron fist.