project. At that time the plans for the work in the final stage of the project were just 
finalized which gave me a unique chance to encourage those involved in the planning 
task to emphasize deduction and automated theorem proving as one of the promising 
application areas for the basic software planned to be operative on PIMS at the end of the 
project. 

Not only did I visit Japan several times in these past thirteen years but also had I a chance 
to host a number of visitors from ICOT during that time period. Dr. Fuchi and the late 
Prof. Moto-Oka visited the Technical University in Munich in September 1981 in order 
to brief me for the conference. Afterwards several other researchers from ICOT (at least 
ten) visited my laboratory in Munich and later the one in Darmstadt, both in Germany, for 
an intensive exchange of results, experiences, and opinions. Among them are Dr. 
Furukawa, Dr. Hasegawa, Dr. Fujita, and others. 

A particular extensive exchange of our respective work became possible by a German-
Japanese workshop on deduction held in 1991 at the GMD in Birlinghofen, Germany, for 
which I was in charge of the coordination. Eight researchers from Japan (with a large 
proportion from ICOT) and about twenty researchers from Germany participated. 

In addition there were many occasions for encounters with researchers from ICOT at 
conferences such as IJCAI, AAAI, Logic Programming, Automated Deduction, etc. 

All this is meant to show that my evaluation of the results finally achieved in this project 
is based on a rather intimate knowledge of what was going on in the project over its entire 
life-span. It should also inform the reader that I followed this project with a great interest 
and sympathy from the very beginning. In this respect my judgment may be regarded as a 
biased one. On the other hand, what is wrong with sharing similar visions in science? 


2. Evaluation criteria 

There are various possible ways of judging a project the size of the FGCS project. 
Depending on which of these ways one applies one would get different evaluation results. 
In order to avoid any possible misunderstandings, I first want to clarify which among the 
following ways I prefer in the present context. 

a. The accountant's way of judgment would be to go back to the original report of the 
project published in 1981 and, taking it as a checklist, find out the percentage of the 
targets that are now actually achieved. I strongly believe that in a basic research project 
the size of FGCS this kind of evaluation would be rather meaningless. Therefore I will 
not follow this way in this report. I might nevertheless mention that according to my 
feeling the project has indeed achieved all its core milestone targets (while some less 
central topics for good reasons have been dropped along the way). 

b. The journalist's way would judge the success against the expectations which were 
generated in the public through whatever process or events. The FGCS project has indeed 
generated various different expectations depending which public we are looking at. For 
instance, the Japanese press understood it very differently in comparison with the press in 
the US. While the public opinion is important for a project this size (since public money 
is involved in substantial amounts), I do not think I should bother with this issue here as a 
technical reviewer. Just as an aside I mention that the FGCS project has now a less 
favorable press in the US and in other parts of the world due to exaggerated expectations 
associated with the project and caused by complex reasons of a political nature in a broad 
sense. This includes the fact that the initial FGCS report for political reasons contained a 


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