From Editor

Japanese Edition Vol.9
Man Hangs His Head," "Humans Defeated," "Anniversary of AI's Victory," "Champion KO'd by Computer"
These headlines appeared in morning papers on May 11, 1997, the day after Gary Kasparov, the world chess champion, was defeated by "Deep Blue," IBM's supercomputer.
A scene in the movie "2001: A Space Odyssey" showed the computer "HAL 9000" playing chess with an astronaut. It was reported that Stanley Kubric, director of the film, chose chess in order to give the audience a vivid impression of HAL's intelligence. Chess was, in a sense, an arena of intelligence, and a computer finally defeated the human world champion of an intelligence game. It was not mere science fiction but a real story. Could it then be the "Anniversary of AI's Victory"?
The development of the chess system started as an attempt to create a computer which can imitate human behavior. In the middle of these efforts, however, researchers found that imitation would make it extremely difficult to achieve their final goal, and changed their direction of development to utilize the computers' strong points; vast memory capacity and high calculation speed. Deep Blue can store and analyze the data of over a million games played ever since the 16th century as well as calculate some 400 million moves per second at its maximum speed. These are the strongest points of computers, however, I am rather impressed by the human ability to come close to matching such a chess machine without the same memory capacity or calculation speed.
As clearly indicated by Deep Blue's victory, the calculation ability of computers has already rose above the human level. The points of consideration in the development of AI are therefore how efficient computer capabilities can be used and how intuition and emotions can be processed.
Deep Blue's victory was certainly a brilliant event for AI research, but it should be the "Birthday of the True AI" rather than the "Anniversary of AI's Victory."
In "2001: A Space Odyssey," HAL 9000 was born in 1997, and Deep Blue defeated the world chess champion the same year, in reality. Only three and a half years remain before the year 2001 when HAL 9000 raised a rebellion against human beings.
Noriko Namikoshi

Japanese Edition Vol.10
A newspaper article reported that it had been suggested to review and reduce Japanese government agencies' extensive use of katakana. (Katakana, one of the two Japanese phonetic letter sets, is primarily used to represent foreign words and phrases.) In my opinion, however, words in kanji (Japanese ideographs) suggested as alternative expressions for katakana words are much more difficult to understand. Anyway, many people may feel at home when words are expressed in kanji characters.
According to a survey on the Japanese language that the Agency for Cultural Affairs conducted in January 1997, 89.2 percent of all respondents answered that they "very often," "often" or "occasionally" get into trouble in understanding foreign words expressed in katakana which are frequently found in newspapers and on TV.
The Japanese computer industry is known for its overuse of katakana words. In particular, users' manuals are a typical example. Most words of a sentence are written in katakana; essentially English words.
Because of the growing use of PCs and the Internet as well as the oversupply of information, some foreign words may easily lose their original meanings once they are put into Japanese context and repeatedly used in a strange or incorrect way. For example, a singing idol made a comment in Japanese which may be translated as "I like to play the Internet." Is the Internet something to play? Awkward expressions like this one make me reflect with some apprehension at my own clumsy wordings in the past. Another example is the word "homepage"; often used in Japanese to mean a WWW site. In English, the word "homepage" originally refers to the first page or main menu of a WWW site. We should use "web page" instead of "homepage" in Japanese.
It cannot be disputed that words change over time and even a wrong meaning can replace the correct definition of a word once it is accepted by most people. Someday in the near future, a new definition of the word "play" as in "to play the Internet" may be listed in Kojien, a Japanese standard dictionary. I have heard that "A Dictionary of Gals' Slang," a current topic on the street, has a number of astonishing and terrifying expressions. It is another story.
I hope that I would always use words and phrases correctly. This decision may wake me totally remain silent.
Noriko Namikoshi

Japanese Edition Vol.11
A few months ago I attended my alma mater's annual fall festival. Their emphasis, traditionally, has been on the presentation of class research. I was very surprised when I turned pages of the festival program and learned the types of "class research" being totally changed nowadays.
Some of their research themes looked like this.
"What is Digitalization?"....(a class of the 2nd grade of junior high) "Internet: Access to the World"....(a class of the 3rd grade of junior high) "Can Supercomputer be beyond Humans?"....(a class of the 1st grade of senior high) "Run, Information!" Optical Communications"....(a class of the 2nd grade of senior high) "What Should Be Done!: Information Moral and Regulations"....(a class of the 2nd grade of senior high)
The general theme of the festival was: Living in the Age of Information - Facing an Age of Multimedia. All this - at a teen-age girls school whose majority of graduates, subsequently, pursue a liberal-arts associates-level degree! Have we evolved to such an age?
Ironically, the fathers of these students resort to calling on the younger colleague when hassled with using the PC mouse due to lack of desk space; while, in fact, these students - the very children of the baffled businessmen - could create cool web pages on their own! I suspect that there is no "solution" to this generational gap.
It is easy to say that there always lies gaps between generations. I think, however, there can at least remain some hope that the growing generational gap come to head by leading-edge technology -- such as that provided by RWCP.
Noriko Namikoshi