Creative Hackers Find A Niche In Japan

TOKYO—Takashi Chikayama is a true hacker—a person who spends long hours working to crack difficult software codes, not because he’s paid overtime, but because he loves programming. Unlike most members of his scientific cadre however, he doesn’t work in a basement university lab in Cambridge, Mass., or a plush office in Silicon Valley. Chikayama’s home is Tokyo—and he is Japan’s newest and quite possibly most potent weapon in the international battle to control the lucrative high technology market for computer software. Japan’s rising supremacy in the realm of hardware is not news. Today, companies like NEC and Hitachi, rather than Motorola and Texas Instruments, have the most sophisticated microchip fabrication facilities. Fujitsu has produced the fastest supercomputer. And this past December, Japan’s Institute for New Generation Computer Technology (ICOT) announced the latest coup: parity with the West in the area of parallel processors, the machines needed to run the artificial intelli gence and neural network software of the next generation. But software is one area in which the Japanese have yet to make a dramatic showing. Today, in implicit recognition of this fact, there is a profound change taking place in the culture of Japanese computer science, one that is increasingly accepting of renegade software “hackers” like Chikayama. Japanese society traditionally has rewarded only teamwork and cooperation, shunning the individuality that is the trademark of a hacker. This commitment to unity extends throughout all levels of society and is a source of great national pride. In a restaurant, for instance, all of the waiters serve all of the tables, as a team. Tipping an individual is not allowed because it is thought to promote an evil, competitive spirit that leads to dissonance. Likewise in the laboratory, programmers have traditionally had to subjugate their love of programming to the dictates of a rigidly controlled managerial system. Even today, at many software design factories, programmers are sometimes forced to fill out manual coding sheets, rather than keying their programs directly into a tenninal. The resulting paper trail is supposed to promote coordinated group efforts that are the hallmark of Japanese productivity. And not coincidentally, it removes power from the individual who, it is feared, could insert a computer virus or otherwise sabotage the system. “In commercial software factories it is very difficult to program what you want to, so the [programmers] may appear to be doing their jobs reluctantly—even though they are hackers at heart,” explains Chikayama, who works for ICOT. The team concept may have been in accordance with traditional values, but the failure of software factories to produce exportable programs has led Japan to reconsider its rigid philosophy. At least in the laboratory, there appears to be an increasing tolerance for the creative activities of “right-brain”, thinking. “Japan’s strong points in cooperation and teamwork come from the left hemisphere of the brain, whereas the hacker is totally coming from the right hemisphere,” explains Takashi Gomi, a computer scientist and former Japanese national now living in Canada. Since his arrival in Canada in 1971, Gomi has realized his ambition to become his own boss. As founder of Applied AI Systems in Kanata, Ontario, he now specializes in keeping American and Canadian companies abreast of Japanese Al technology. Gomi says that the inability to follow his own curiosity and instincts was-one of the main reasons he left Japan. But recently he has seen signs to indicate that the situation is slowly changing. During the early years of the ICOT project, for example, institute executives joked that they had only one hacker, Chikayama. But since then they have realized that the software to do speech recognition, natural language understanding, and all the other humanlike tasks ascribed to Japan’s next generation computer are difficult to generate solely through teamwork. “ICOT now realizes that they will never achieve their ultimate goals without the creative contributions of hackers,” Gomi says. So today Chikayama supervises more than a dozen hackers, whose task isto put to practical use the $220 million ICOT spent on its next-generation hardware. “At ICOT, where everything is very free, the programmers have the opportunity to start hacking their own programs,” Chikayama says proudly. The programmers have already produced small demos that can prove theorems, dissect natural language into its parts of speech, and make judgments, such as picking stocks for a portfolio. All such tasks would be very cumbersome for computers running on conventional software. Chikayama says that he is trying to walk a fine line between fitting in at ICOT and fostering a creative environment for his hackers. Thus, rather than following strict schedules and making his staff work on bits and pieces of one large project, each hacker has his own project. “We get together for meetings, but that is mainly to share our ideas rather than to coordinate activities or to report progress,” Chikayama says. This new-found freedom from management is slowly spreading to groups of independent, entrepreneurial hackers. One group of such programmers is led by Shigemitsu Ohzahata, president of his own small software company, Macintosh Intelligent Software, and a member of the Macintosh Programmers Group. “According to Apple, there are 3,000 more Macintoshes sold every month jn Japan], and that is adding members to our programmers group,” Ohzahata says. Even though the Macintosh is nearly twice as expensive as a comparably equipped Japanese computer, he explains, the growing number of Japanese hackers—and the ease of hacking on the Mac—has fueled these sales. So far, fully a third of the members of the Macintosh Programmers Group are hackers, according to Ohzahata. And many of these free-wheeling programmers are working on the same things as their western counterparts: the next generation of artificial intelligence software. Ohzahata is adding an extra dimension to his artificial intelligence packages by including computeraided instruction that teaches the novice how to use his programs. Others are working on everything from understanding natural language to building expert systems to creating a voice-activated user interface to computers. In the words of one U.S. software expert, “having hackers is an absolute necessity for making technological breakthroughs.” And it would appear that this is yet another area of high-tech expertise where Japan is evening the odds. Oregon-based freelancer R. Colin Johnson is author of Cognizers—Neural Networks and Machines That Think (John Wiley & Sons, 1988).

Creative Hackers Find A Niche In Japan

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