In the early 1980s there was an exceptionally strong research group in logic pro-
gramming at the University of Melbourne led by John-Louis Lassez and containing 
John Lloyd, Rao, and others. As I understand it the Australian Minister for Science 
visited ICOT around 1983 or 84 and heard many favourable things about the research
of the University of Melbourne group. He returned to Australia and made a decision 
to fund a "Machine Intelligence Project" based on the logic programming group at 
the University of Melbourne. The level of funding was good by the standards of the 
time, but unfortunately the huge amount of international interest that was generated 
by ICOT in logic programming and related areas caused talent in this area to be at 
an absolute premium. Hence it was not long before many members of this exceptional 
group had accepted much more attractive positions overseas. 

I believe from informal discussions with a number of these people over the years, 
many of them would have quite happily stayed at the University of Melbourne and 
hence brought great distinction to the University of Melbourne and to Australia.[1]
However a combination of an inflexible university system (since improved somewhat) 
and a lack of any sort of understanding of the emerging importance of the field of 
logic programming on the part of various government decision makers meant that a 
significant opportunity to establish a stable group of international stature in this area 
was unfortunately lost. 

Researchers from a number of other Australian research organizations had various 
interactions over the years with ICOT but that with the University of Melbourne was 
the most substantial of them. 

ANU took an initiative around 1987 to establish what is in effect the national centre 
for high performance computing and now has 4 supercomputers - 2 Japanese and 2 
American. This initiative was numerically based but because of ANU's long-standing 
interest in logic and theorem proving as well as ICOT's announcement at the 1988 
FGCS conference of the plan to build the PIM machines, ANU decided to explore with 
ICOT the possibility of establishing some sort of agreement on research cooperation. 

Discussions commenced in 1989, initially with Dr Kurozumi and then also with Dr 
Uchida, in tandem with discussions to have ICOT participate in the 11th International 
Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence which was to be held in Sydney in August, 
1991. In 1991 a series of letters was exchanged between the Centre I head at ANU 
and ICOT to establish research cooperation in the field of theorem proving. Following 
ICOT's very successful participation in IJCAI-91, a party of about 30 ICOT scientists 
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[1] An example of what could have been is nicely seen in the fact that the 4th International Logic 
Programming Conference was held at the University of Melbourne in 1987. A major international 
event in logic and computing with a heavy emphasis on logic programming co-sponsored by the 
University of Melbourne was also held in Melbourne in early 1984. 


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