of AI... 

Great!  Welcome to the club and tell us all about it.  Most poeple in
the community genuinely want new people to be thinking about AI.  You
should be aware that you will probably not get a whole lot of
enthusiasm from the established scientists for a few reasons:

- We receive or hear about such proposals about once a month.  The
  vast majority are naive.

- Many smart people have been thinking about the AI problem for a long
  time.  There have been many ideas that have been pursued by
  sophisticated research teams which turned out to be dead ends.  This
  includes all of the obvious ideas.  Most grand solutions proposed
  have been seen before (about 70% seem to be recapitulations of
  Minsky proposals).

- The grand ideas are almost always far too vague to implement.  One
  of the tough lessons of graduate school is how to turn a vague idea
  into something that is implementable and testable.  Unless you have
  experience at it, it is unlikely your first try will have the needed
  precision. 

- It is the general opinion of the research community that we're just
  not ready to solve the general AI problem yet (cf. question on
  CYC).  Why that is should be addressed in another question.

OK, now that we've covered the harsh reality, you shouldn't get
discouraged.  If you're having fun with it, keep doing it.  You're
guaranteed to learn something while participating in a fascinating
hobby.  Who knows- you may still come up with a really great and new
idea.  Finally, [and this is just Ric's opinion] most of the really
interesting AI people started out because they had the same kind of
idea to make AI better than it is now.

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