In 1982, Japan’s Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) launched the Fifth Generation Computer Systems Project, with ICOT, betting on Prolog, parallelism, and knowledge bases.
The West reacted with competitive alarm; initiatives sprang up in the U.S. and Europe. The project produced valuable research in logic and parallelism but not the promised commercial leap.
As it wound down around 1992, it coincided with the second AI winter. The lesson remained: a favorite architecture does not guarantee market dominance without data, interfaces, and profitable use cases.
