Real World Computing program - overview

In 1992 the Real World Computing (RWC) program was launched by MITI (Ministry of International Trade and Industry, Japan). This is a Japanese new national project on information processing as the successor to the Fifth Generation Computer project which formally ended in 1992. The primary objective of the new program is to lay the theoretical foundation and to pursue the technological realization of human-like flexible information processing as a new paradigm of information processing towards the highly information-based society of the 21st century. Contrary to that the Fifth Generation project pursued the aspect of logical (symbol-based) information processing of humans, the RWC program is rather pursuing another aspect of intuitive (pattern-based) information processing as a new framework and foundation of information processing, and also aiming at unifying both aspects in a bottom-up manner.