Excavating AI

There's an urban legend about the early days of machine vision, the subfield of artificial intelligence (AI) concerned with teaching machines to detect and interpret images. In 1966, Marvin Minsky was a young professor at MIT, making a name for himself in the emerging field of artificial intelligence.[1] Deciding that the ability to interpret images was a core feature of intelligence, Minsky turned to an undergraduate student, Gerald Sussman, and asked him to "spend the summer linking a camera to a computer and getting the computer to describe what it saw."[2] This became the Summer Vision Project.[3] Needless to say, the project of getting computers to "see" was much harder than anyone expected, and would take a lot longer than a single summer.