Pentagon research agency DARPA is readying a four-year project to design artificial intelligence systems based on machines that can teach themselves using algorithms. An additional goal is to make it possible for ordinary people to build these machines. The agency believes it is possible to design and build computers that learn and evolve, not by modeling them after the human brain, but rather by using algorithms.

Called “probabilistic programming,” these algorithms “parse through vast amounts of data and select the best of it. After that, the machine learns to repeat the process and do it better,” explains Wired. “But building such machines remains really, really hard: The agency calls it ‘Herculean.’”

In order to speed up the development process, DARPA is inviting scientists to a Virginia conference to brainstorm. “What will follow are 46 months of development, along with annual ‘Summer Schools,’ bringing in the scientists together with ‘potential customers’ from the private sector and the government,” the article explains.

The program will be called the Probabilistic Programming for Advanced Machine Learning, or PPAML, and will seek out scientists to figure out how to “enable new applications that are impossible to conceive of using today’s technology,” while also “making experts in the field ‘radically more effective,’” according to a recent agency announcement.

This sort of machine learning has the potential to improve intelligence systems, surveillance and reconnaissance, a core military necessity, writes Wired. “The technology can be used to make better speech-recognition applications and self-driving cars. It keeps pace with the ever-enlarging war against Internet spam filling our search engines and e-mail inboxes.”