Thanks for the link. After 60 years of promising to make computers think even the fastest machines on the planet with access to Google's entire database still have trouble recognizing a cat from a dog, so I have to agree with the article that yes it was "Ahead of its time...In the early 21st century, many flavors of parallel computing began to proliferate, including multi-core architectures at the low-end and massively parallel processing at the high end."

As 5th generation shows small pockets of researchers haven't forgotten evolution has given each of us a model to follow for making intelligent machines. I hope they continue down this road because faster calculators aren't going to get us there in my lifetime. You feel differently?

As the article mentions "CPU performance quickly pushed through the "obvious" barriers that experts perceived in the 1980s, and the value of parallel computing quickly dropped", where as 30 years later single threaded CPU performance has gone from doubling every 2 years to 5-10% per year since ~2007. Combine that with the needs of big data, and the time is right to reconsider some of these "failures".

Parallel programming is the biggest challenge facing programmers this decade, which is why we get posts like this on callback hell. Isn't it possible that part of the problem lies in decisions made 50 years ago?

I'm not saying we need to start from scratch, but with these new problems we're facing, maybe it's time reconsider some of our assumptions.

"It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain an idea without accepting it." -Aristotle