A 50,000 neuron artificial brain

[Hugo de Garis]

Dear Connectionists,

		    A 50,000 Neuron Artificial Brain

50,000 is roughly the number of artificial neurons I can grow/evolve based on 
cellular automata in the 32 mega CA cell "CAM8" cellular automata machine from
MIT that I have on my desk.

Using hand coded cellular automata rules to grow neurons from seeder
CA cells, one can then feed in genetic algorithm "chromosome" growth
strings into dendrites and axons to grow random neural circuits, whose
fitness at controlling some process is measured after the circuit is
grown and used to transmit CA based neural signals. Using these ideas
and a future "superCAM" our group hopes to build grow/evolve an
artificial brain of a billion neurons by 2001. This is quite feasible
because RAM is cheap (even gigabytes), the states of the CA cells can be
stored in gigabytes of RAM, so too the CA state transition rules. The
bottle neck is the CA processor. MIT's CAM8 can update 200 million
CA cells of 16 bits per second. Our super CAM should be thousands of
times faster.

Reference :

 "An Artificial Brain : ATR's CAM-Brain Project Aims to Build/Evolve an
Artificial Brain with a Million Neural Net Modules inside a Trillion Cell
Cellular Automata Machine", Hugo de Garis, New Generation Computing Journal, 
Vol. 12, No. 2, Ohmsha & Springer Verlag, 1994. 


For more information concerning our CAM-Brain Project, please contact

Dr. Hugo de Garis,
Brain Builder Group,
Evolutionary Systems Dept,
ATR Human Information Processing Research Labs,
2-2 Hikaridai, Seika-cho, Soraku-gun,
Kansai Science City, Kyoto-fu, 619-02, Japan.
tel. + 81 (0)7749 5 1079, fax. + 81 (0)7749 5 1008,
email.  degaris at hip.atr.co.jp

Cheers,
           Hugo de Garis.