Strategic Computing Initiative

That was an awful period, at the beginning of the AI Winter. The expert systems people were in charge, but expert systems couldn't do very much. I made the unpopular comment at the time that expert systems will turn out to be more important than syntax-directed parsing (once a hot topic in computer science - YACC, Bison, etc.) but less important than relational databases.

I visited CMU and was inside the ALV once. Didn't get to see it move, though. It had a really slow 2D LIDAR scanner, with two moving mirrors, and three racks of SUN workstations. It wasn't a fundamentally bad idea. It just needed about four more orders of magnitude of compute power. They made it work by making it really slow, using a hydraulic transmission to allow creeping speed. By the DARPA Grand Challenge of 2005, it was finally possible to do off-road navigation. It's taken another two decades to deal with complex traffic successfully.

Neural nets were around, but nobody had enough compute power to use them on anything useful. I once had to write a neural net program to recognize digits 0-9 as a class assignment. That was about what you could do before 2000 or so.

The original link, not sure why it was replaced by moderators (is HN still being moderated by @dang alone?): https://paleofuture.com/blog/2013/4/30/darpa-spent-1-billion...

Japan had also its 5th generation project: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_artificial_intellig...

Today (Tues Jun 11 2024) the HN black bar appeared in memory of Lynn Conway. Among her many many achievements, she was the administrator of the Strategic Computing Initiative for a while in the 1980s while she was working at DARPA.

Wikipedia has an article that isn't a Guidelines-violating heap of propaganda.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Computing_Initiati...