True -- I didn't mean to communicate that Santa Fe was a failure writ large. Their contribution was very important!

Though I think it's fair to say that the torch was picked up and carried by others with a different set of strategies.

Clarke's second law:

When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

Also see Minsky's "Perceptrons"

The problem with almost all such proofs is that people (even those who know better) read them as "this can't be done" when in fact they tell you "it can't be done unless you break one of the following assumptions."

I agree that it's unfair to say they failed, but it's likewise unfair to say that their success was in telling us our limits rather than exploring what we need to do to get around the roadblocks.