Announcement · October 1981
Japan's Fifth Generation project
At a conference in Tokyo, Japan made public a ten-year programme to build machines founded on logical inference rather than number crunching.
Why it matters
A state declared AI a national priority for the first time, and thereby pushed the United States and Britain to restore the funding they had cut.
The project aimed at parallel machines executing logical inference, with languages based on Prolog. The response was quick: MCC in the United States, the Alvey programme in Britain, ESPRIT in Europe. It ended in 1992 having spent some 54 billion yen; the hardware bet on logic programming did not pay off, because general-purpose processors grew cheap faster.
Event record
- Event date
- October 1981
- Timeline date
- Event date
- Verification
- Sources gathered automatically · September 17, 2026
- Lines
- ID
- evt-0139
The international conference in Tokyo in October 1981, where the programme was made public. The ministry started the project itself in 1982, when ICOT was founded; this record marks the announcement, not the start.
Records that link to this one
- Related The Connection Machine
A second bet of those years on parallel architecture for AI workloads.
- Related China's New Generation AI Development Plan
The second time in history a state made AI a national priority.
- Related The Bletchley Declaration
The previous international event of this kind was the Tokyo conference of 1981.
- Related Strategic Computing: DARPA's plan
The second state programme for machine intelligence in the same decade; the plan itself does not name the Japanese one.
- Builds on Britain's Alvey Programme
In the Lords the Government called the programme a response to the Japanese national initiative, and the minister described the research as what is 'not wholly accurately' called fifth generation computers.
Advanced Information Technology: The Alvey Report, House of Lords, 28 April 1983, vol. 441 (the statement repeated by Lord Trefgarne, and questions)Advanced Information Technology, House of Commons, 28 April 1983, vol. 41, col. 1006 ff. (statement by the Secretary of State for Industry, Patrick Jenkin) - Related Europe's ESPRIT programme
The third programme of those years to promise 'the next computer generation' through knowledge processing; the decision does not name Japan.