Strategic Computing - DARPA and the Quest for Machine Intelligence, 1983-1993
| Author | Alex Roland with Philip Shiman |
|---|---|
| Published | 2002 |
| Format | Book |
TL;DR — A history of DARPA’s Strategic Computing Initiative, the 1983–93 programme that spent about $1 billion trying to build machine intelligence, and why it fell short.
A volume in MIT Press’s History of Computing series (2002) by Alex Roland, a Duke historian of military technology, with Philip Shiman. It tells the story of the Strategic Computing Initiative, DARPA’s ten-year programme launched in 1983 — partly in response to Japan’s Fifth Generation project — to achieve machine intelligence through advances in chips, parallel architectures and AI applications such as an autonomous land vehicle and a pilot’s associate.
The book is organised around the programme managers who shaped it, starting with Robert Kahn as visionary and Robert Cooper as salesman, and follows the programme through its connections to the Information Processing Techniques Office, the “AI autumn”, and its later reorganisation. It concludes that the programme did not deliver machine intelligence but did advance the underlying computing technologies.
What it is: a scholarly history from a university press, built on DARPA records and interviews; the standard account of the programme. This copy is a scan of an in-copyright book.
Where this came from
- A copy saved in October 2026.
456 pages. A PDF copy is held in Kyle’s private archive; it is not linked or shared here.