I finally completed reading this book titled 'The Fifth Generation' by Edward Feigenbaum and Pamela McCorduck. I have been reading this book since a long time. It is about the fifth generation project that was launched by Japan in early 1980's. The project was to come up with a new generation of computer systems which were extremely fast as well as intelligent. It was designed to be a 10 year project with lot of funds assigned to it by the government of Japan. The idea was for Japan to make a strong position for itself in the computer world. The book talks about this whole project in detail, the fifth generation conference that was held to declare to the world about this project, and how various countries reacted to it. It talks in detail about how skeptic US was and a group of people motivated by this project who felt that US needs to respond to this challenge and in turn start working on it.
Eventually at the end of the 10-year period this project failed and had to be canceled. Of course the book does not talk about that as it was written while this project was in progress. The authors give details about research in the area of Artificial Intelligence at that point of time and all the logistics involved in getting funded for various research projects. It showed the perspectives of different countries towards research. The main idea was that in US a research project was considered important enough to be funded if it had applications for the defense department. Some parts of the book gets boring, but other parts of it had interesting and useful information. Good read for one who is interested in computer science research and especially for one who wants to know the history of Artificial Intelligence research.
Eventually at the end of the 10-year period this project failed and had to be canceled. Of course the book does not talk about that as it was written while this project was in progress. The authors give details about research in the area of Artificial Intelligence at that point of time and all the logistics involved in getting funded for various research projects. It showed the perspectives of different countries towards research. The main idea was that in US a research project was considered important enough to be funded if it had applications for the defense department. Some parts of the book gets boring, but other parts of it had interesting and useful information. Good read for one who is interested in computer science research and especially for one who wants to know the history of Artificial Intelligence research.
