<blockquote> In the days when Sussman was a novice Minsky once came to him as he sat hacking at the PDP-6. "What are you doing?", asked Minsky. "I am training a

<blockquote> In the days when Sussman was a novice Minsky once came to him as he sat hacking at the PDP-6. "What are you doing?", asked Minsky. "I am training a randomly wired neural net to play Tic-Tac-Toe." "Why is the net wired randomly?", asked Minsky. "I do not want it to have any preconceptions of how to play." Minsky shut his eyes. "Why do you close your eyes?", Sussman asked his teacher. "So the room will be empty." At that moment, Sussman was enlightened. </blockquote> My point: not to confuse "no preconceptions" with "not much directly usable knowledge." Look at the resumes of the people on the team. You've got the head of one of the premier research institutions in the nation (Sandia), a national medal of science winner who has consulted about the Kuwait oil well disaster, a robotics engineer, and a petroleum engineer. And an astrophysicist. About Feynman, remember, he was a Nobelist and widely understood, when he was appointed, to be the most brilliant physicist of the latter half of the 20th century. His university (Caltech) runs a NASA facility, JPL, where his sister and a lot of his colleagues worked.