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10 big ideas from the Pentagon lab that (really) invented the Internet

The Pentagon's DARPA scientists are working to bring to fruition innovations that could affect daily life as dramatically as the World Wide Web. Here are 10 of them.

4. Big Mechanism

  • By Anna Mulrine Staff writer

What if the medical cure for cancer exists, but it’s spread out over more than 1,000 books and obscure journal articles?

The idea here, behind a project called Big Mechanism, is to build a computer software that can read everything ever published on a topic.

Computers can’t read journal articles, but if humans can teach them how, then the computers could compile “millions of tiny results,” says program manager Paul Cohen, and weave them together in a way that creates one big picture, instead of disparate journal articles written by specialists, for specialists. A machine reading an obscure journal article could determine “ ‘Oh, wow, this obscure journal article pertains to this theory, and here’s why, and here’s who should know about it,' ” Dr. Cohen says. “It would change the way people develop knowledge.”

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Mark Sappenfield
Editor

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