The Summer Vision Project
An MIT memo assigned a group of students to build a system over one summer that separates an image into objects and background and describes the scene.
Why it matters
The sharpest available measure of how badly the field underestimated perception: a decades-long problem was written down as a summer assignment.
The memo is specific: camera input, background separation, region extraction, scene description. Each of those turned out to be a field of its own. The story is often retold as an anecdote, but the document itself is an ordinary work plan, which is what makes it telling.