The field of artificial intelligence (AI) has as its goal the development of machines that can perceive, reason, communicate, and act in complex environments much like humans can, or possibly even better than humans can. Even though the field has produced some practically useful machines with rudiments of these abilities, it is generally conceded that the ultimate goal is still distant. That being so, there is much discussion and argument about what are the best approaches for AI in the sense of laying the core foundations for achieving ultimate goals as well as best in the sense of producing practically useful shorter-term results. Thus, a number of different paradigms have emerged over the past thirty-five years or so. Each has its ardent advocates, and some have produced sufficiently many interesting results so as not to be dismissable out of hand. Perhaps combinations of these approaches will be required. In any case, the advocates of these approaches often feel that theirs is the "breakthrough" methodology that deserves special support. In order to acquaint researchers and others with these paradigms and their principal results, the Santa Fe Institute organizes a workshop to which advocates actively working in the different approaches will be invited. Such a workshop allows leading workers to understand each others' points of view and the relationships among them. Specifically the workshop is not organized around what classically have been the main sub-disciplines of AI, namely machine vision, natural language processing, knowledge representation, planning, expert systems, and so on. Instead, different perspectives are presented on how the whole, or major parts, of AI ought to be attacked.
