After 50 years and countless dead ends, incremental progress,
and modest breakthroughs, artificial intelligence researchers
are asking for a do-over. The $5 million Mind Machine Project
(MMP), a patchwork team of two dozen academics, students and
researchers, intends to go back to the discipline's beginnings,
rebuilding the field from the ground up. With 20/20 hindsight, a
few generations worth of experience, and better, faster
technology, this time researchers in AI -- an ambiguous field to
begin with -- plan to get things right. The study of AI is a
half a century old, beginning with lofty expectations at a 1956
conference but quickly fragmenting into different
specializations and sub-fields. The MMP wants to roll back the
clock, fixing early assumptions that are now foundations of the
field and redefining what the objectives of AI research should
be. The fundamental problem, it seems, is that the mind, memory
and body function both together and separately to solve any
number of problems, and the way they w