THE FIFTH GENERATION—ALMOST In the early 1980s the "Fifth Generation" was an attempt by the Japanese to deliver a system of artificial intelligence—computers that think. This was Japan's challenge to the world to build sophisticated, intelligent machines in a ten-year project. This development—in contrast to machines that merely respond to preprogrammed instructions—would not merely have been another quantitative improvement in computing technology, with all the economic implications. It was an attempt at a new qualitative leap for human civilization and the world economy. Japan learned many things from the major industrialized countries at the dawn of the computer age, and today's Japanese computer technology was fostered on this knowledge. It had been predicted that such an intelligent computer would be able to communicate in natural spoken language with its user, store vast knowledge databases, and search rapidly through these databases, making intelligent inferences, drawing logical conclusions and processing images and sees objects in the way that humans do. While many new subtechnologies were developed, the overall goal was never realized. Many of the Japanese scientists and engineers involved in the Fifth Generation project were actually skeptical about the direction of the project and not very hopeful about spectacular results. Their doubts were well-founded. By 1992, the project was seriously behind schedule and had only produced a few deliverables. It has since been suggested that research into other technologies, such as neural networks, may present more promising approaches to artificial intelligence. These results were considered an immense and embarrassing anticlimax. | 
