The Japanese government spent US $400 million in the '80's (a lot in those days) to try to jump ahead of "western" computer technology via its "5th Generation Project". https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14047780
> Japanese Government said this week that it was willing to give away the software developed by the project to anyone who wanted it, even foreigners.
Was wondering what they released as a result. Surely after a $400 in 80's money they had some lines of code written.
Apparently they focused on concurrent logic programming and wasted a lot of money on exotic hardware in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_generation_computer by the time they were done off-the-shelf CPUs could run circles around the fancy workstations.
A primary problem was the choice of concurrent logic programming as the bridge between the parallel computer architecture and the use of logic as a knowledge representation and problem solving language for AI applications.
Personal anecdote: I once asked a retired Japanese computer scientist why the 5th generation project had failed. He replied with:
"What do you mean 'failed'? All my colleagues who worked on this project have become professors!" In this respect, the project was actually a smashing success.
The basis for it all ... Prolog.