[extropy-chat] [agi] DARPA Ends Brain Reverse Engineering Project

[Ben Goertzel]

Well, Novamente LLC submitted a proposal to this that was rejected.

My impression was that most of the recipients of the BICA funding did 
not have credible AGI approaches, and many were in fact relatively new 
to the AGI problem.

The recipients were by and large smart scientists with interesting 
ideas, but I don't think DARPA did a tremendously good job of picking 
out projects with deep and relatively mature AGI designs.

So, I am not too surprised by this conclusion...

-- Ben 



Jef Allbright wrote:
> FYI,
> - Jef
>
>
> An article in the New Jersey Star-Ledger 
> <http://www.nj.com/news/ledger/index.ssf?/base/news-11/1173937313282210.xml&coll=1> 
> says DARPA has "quietly killed" their project to reverse engineering 
> the human brain. The project, known as Biologically Inspired Cognitive 
> Architectures <http://www.darpa.mil/ipto/programs/bica/index.htm> 
> (BICA), had been compared to other very difficult projects such as the 
> atomic bomb or moon landing. DARPA has denied requests to explain why 
> they dropped the project and neuroscientists who were involved said, 
> "All we know is it's dead". The first phase was a $9.5 million project 
> planning stage. The cancelled phase 2 was to be a $50-100 million 
> attempt to design "psychologically-based and neurobiology-based 
> cognitive architectures" based on the human brain. There is 
> speculation that DARPA concluded phase 2 was simply to ambitious. For 
> more detailed information see DARPA's BICA Information Pamplhlet 
> <http://www.darpa.mil/BAA/pdfs/baa05-18pip.pdf> (PDF format) or the 
> reports from Phase 1 participants 
> <http://www.darpa.mil/ipto/programs/bica/phase1.htm>.
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