Designing the next generation: Machines that are much faster, much smarter, and far more accessible than current ones require advances on a broad technological front

In 1981 a group of computer scientists in Japan proposed to leap-frog the next generation of conventional computers and build machines based on massively parallel hardware and artificial-intelligence software. Since then a number of similar projects have been proposed in the United States, Great Britain, and the European Economic Community. All the programs have their own national flavors [see “The teams and the players,” p. 45], but the technology underlying them is basically the same: advanced computer architectures, advanced software engineering, very large-scale integrated circuits, and artificial intelligence.