So It Begins: Darpa Sets Out to Make Computers That Can Teach Themselves

The Pentagon's blue-sky research agency is readying a nearly four-year project to boost artificial intelligence systems by building machines that can teach themselves -- while making it easier for ordinary schlubs like us to build them, too. That path fell out of favor among computer scientists years ago as a means of creating artificial intelligence; we'd have to understand our own brains first before building a working artificial version of one. But the agency thinks we can build machines that learn and evolve, using algorithms -- "probabilistic programming" -- to parse through vast amounts of data and select the best of it. After that, the machine learns to repeat the process and do it better. But building such machines remains really, really hard: The agency calls it "Herculean."