After 10 years and $400m of investment, Japan’s Ministry of International Trade & Industry this week wound up the Institute for Computers Of Tomorrow or Fifth Generation project, admitting that the effort had failed to meet its goal of developing computers that would use inferential reasoning to solve problems in the way that people do; most of the participants – all the Japanese majors – built only one-off prototype machines, and did not put them into production; according to the Washington Post, all the software developed will be put into the public domain, but unless someone pays to have it converted to run on commercially-available machines, it will be of little value.
