The

United States The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major unincorporated territorie ...

government's Strategic Computing Initiative funded research into advanced computer hardware and

artificial intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by animals and humans. Example tasks in which this is done include speech re ...

from 1983 to 1993. The initiative was designed to support various projects that were required to develop machine intelligence in a prescribed ten-year time frame, from chip design and manufacture,

computer architecture In computer engineering, computer architecture is a description of the structure of a computer system made from component parts. It can sometimes be a high-level description that ignores details of the implementation. At a more detailed level, t ...

software. The

Department of Defense Department of Defence or Department of Defense may refer to: Current departments of defence * Department of Defence (Australia) * Department of National Defence (Canada) * Department of Defence (Ireland) * Department of National Defense (Philippin ...

spent a total of $1 billion on the project. The inspiration for the program was Japan's

fifth generation computer The Fifth Generation Computer Systems (FGCS) was a 10-year initiative begun in 1982 by Japan's Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) to create computers using massively parallel computing and logic programming. It aimed to create ...

project, an enormous initiative that set aside billions for research into computing and artificial intelligence. As with

Sputnik Sputnik 1 (; see § Etymology) was the first artificial Earth satellite. It was launched into an elliptical low Earth orbit by the Soviet Union on 4 October 1957 as part of the Soviet space program. It sent a radio signal back to Earth for t ...

in 1957, the American government saw the Japanese project as a challenge to its technological dominance. The British government also funded a program of their own around the same time, known as

Alvey The Alvey Programme was a British government sponsored research programme in information technology that ran from 1984 to 1990. The programme was a reaction to the Japanese Fifth Generation project, which aimed to create a computer using massive ...

, and a consortium of U.S. companies funded another similar project, the

Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation, originally the Microelectronics and Computer Consortium and widely seen as the acronym MCC, was the first, and at one time one of the largest, computer industry research and development con ...

. The goal of SCI, and other contemporary projects, was nothing less than full machine intelligence. "The machine envisioned by SC", according to Alex Roland and Philip Shiman, "would run ten billion instructions per second to see, hear, speak, and think like a human. The degree of integration required would rival that achieved by the human brain, the most complex instrument known to man." The initiative was conceived as an integrated program, similar to the Apollo moon program, where different subsystems would be created by various companies and academic projects and eventually brought together into a single integrated system. Roland and Shiman wrote that "While most research programs entail tactics or strategy, SC boasted grand strategy, a master plan for an entire campaign." The project was funded by the

Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is a research and development agency of the United States Department of Defense responsible for the development of emerging technologies for use by the military. Originally known as the Adv ...

and directed by the

Information Processing Technology Office The Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO), originally "Command and Control Research",Lyon, Matthew; Hafner, Katie (1999-08-19). ''Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins Of The Internet'' (p. 39). Simon & Schuster. Kindle Edition. was par ...

(IPTO). By 1985 it had spent $100 million, and 92 projects were underway at 60 institutions: half in industry, half in universities and government labs. Robert Kahn, who directed IPTO in those years, provided the project with its early leadership and inspiration. Clint Kelly managed the SC Initiative for three years and developed many of the specific application programs for DARPA, such as the Autonomous Land Vehicle. By the late 1980s, it became apparent that the project would not succeed in creating machine intelligence at the levels that had been hoped for. Insiders in the program cited problems in communication, organization, and integration. When Jack Schwarz ascended to the leadership of IPTO in 1987, he cut funding to

research (the software component) "deeply and brutally", "eviscerating" the program (wrote

Pamela McCorduck Pamela Ann McCorduck (October 27, 1940 – October 18, 2021) was a British-born American author of books about the history and philosophical significance of artificial intelligence, the future of engineering, and the role of women and technolog ...

). Schwarz felt that DARPA should focus its funding only on those technologies which showed the most promise. In his words, DARPA should "surf", rather than "dog paddle", and he felt strongly AI was not "the next wave". Although the program failed to meet its goal of high-level machine intelligence, it did meet some of its specific technical objectives, for example those of autonomous land navigation. The Autonomous Land Vehicle program and its sister

Navlab Navlab is a series of autonomous and semi-autonomous vehicles developed by teams from The Robotics Institute at the School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University. Later models were produced under a new department created specifically for ...

project at Carnegie Mellon University, in particular, laid the scientific and technical foundation for many of the driverless vehicle programs that came after it, such as the Demo II and III programs (ALV being Demo I), Perceptor, and the

DARPA Grand Challenge The DARPA Grand Challenge is a prize competition for American autonomous vehicles, funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the most prominent research organization of the United States Department of Defense. Congress has authorize ...

. The use of video cameras plus laser scanners and inertial navigation units pioneered by the SCI ALV program form the basis of almost all commercial

driverless car A self-driving car, also known as an autonomous car, driver-less car, or robotic car (robo-car), is a car that is capable of traveling without human input.Xie, S.; Hu, J.; Bhowmick, P.; Ding, Z.; Arvin, F.,Distributed Motion Planning for S ...

developments today. It also helped to advance the state of the art of computer hardware to a considerable degree. On the software side, the initiative funded development of the

Dynamic Analysis and Replanning Tool The Dynamic Analysis and Replanning Tool, commonly abbreviated to DART, is an artificial intelligence program used by the U.S. military to optimize and schedule the transportation of supplies or personnel and solve other logistical problems. DART ...

, a program that handled

logistics Logistics is generally the detailed organization and implementation of a complex operation. In a general business sense, logistics manages the flow of goods between the point of origin and the point of consumption to meet the requirements of ...

using

techniques. This was a huge success, saving the Department of Defense billions during

Desert Storm The Gulf War was a 1990–1991 armed campaign waged by a 35-country military coalition in response to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. Spearheaded by the United States, the coalition's efforts against Iraq were carried out in two key phases: ...

. The project was superseded in the 1990s by the

Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative The Advanced Simulation and Computing Program (or ASC) is a super-computing program run by the National Nuclear Security Administration, in order to simulate, test, and maintain the United States nuclear stockpile. The program was created in 1995 ...

and then by the

Advanced Simulation and Computing Program The Advanced Simulation and Computing Program (or ASC) is a super-computing program run by the National Nuclear Security Administration, in order to simulate, test, and maintain the United States nuclear stockpile. The program was created in 1995 ...

. These later programs did not include artificial general intelligence as a goal, but instead focused on

supercomputing A supercomputer is a computer with a high level of performance as compared to a general-purpose computer. The performance of a supercomputer is commonly measured in floating-point operations per second (FLOPS) instead of million instructions ...

for large scale simulation, such as

atomic bomb A nuclear weapon is an explosive device that derives its destructive force from nuclear reactions, either fission (fission bomb) or a combination of fission and fusion reactions (thermonuclear bomb), producing a nuclear explosion. Both bomb ...

simulations. The Strategic Computing Initiative of the 1980s is distinct from the 2015

National Strategic Computing Initiative The National Strategic Computing Initiative (NSCI) is a United States initiative calling for the accelerated development of technologies for exascale supercomputers, and funding research into post-semiconductor computing. The initiative was crea ...

—the two are unrelated.

Notes

References

* * * * {{McCorduck 2004, pp. 426–432 History of artificial intelligence History of computing

See also

Notes

References