<P> The Fifth Generation Computer Systems (Present and Beyond) (FGCS) was an initiative by Japan's Ministry of International Trade and Industry, begun in 1982, to create a computer using massively parallel computing / processing . It was to be the result of a massive government / industry research project in Japan during the 1980s . It aimed to create an "epoch - making computer" with supercomputer - like performance and to provide a platform for future developments in artificial intelligence . There was also an unrelated Russian project also named as a fifth - generation computer (see Kronos (computer)). </P> <P> In his "Trip report" paper, Prof. Ehud Shapiro (which focused the FGCS project on concurrent logic programming as the software foundation for the project) captured the rationale and motivations driving this huge project: </P>

When did the fifth generation of computers start