Two Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute professors who are trying to build a machine that can learn by reading basic texts, like algebra and astronomy, in three years.

Funding by a DARPA grant, they hope to create a machine that can read sections of textbooks and answer questions based on the material. They believe that in the future, such AI machines might be able to take in all the relevant cultural, historical, geographical data about an area and then scout it out.