|
  |
|
|
Krasnow Institute > Monday Seminars > Abstracts ATR's BILLION NEURON ARTIFICIAL BRAIN PROJECT Dr. Hugo de Garis Dr. Hugo de Garis heads the Brain Builder Group at ATR, a research lab in Kyoto, Japan. He expects, with the help of his group and international collaborators (from 6 countries), to build an artificial brain with a billion artificial neurons, with evolved cellular automata (CA) based neural circuits, by the year 2001. His group has already created neural circuits containing 10 million neurons, and expects to achieve its target on time. By evolving neural net modules with roughly 100 neurons each, at ELECTRONIC SPEEDS (e.g. in less than a second) in special FPGA (Xilinx XC6264 chip) based evolvable hardware (called a CAM-Brain Machine (CBM)), the group will be able to download these CA based neural circuit modules (each with its own evolved user specified function) into user specified brain architectures embedded in a RAM based space of trillions of CA cells. The same CBM (programmable) hardware then updates the whole RAM CA space frequently enough (e.g. 30 times a second, i.e. at over 120 BILLION CA cells a second) for real time operation. This CBM is currently being designed and built by Dr. Michael Korkin of Genobyte Inc. of Colorado, USA. By the end of 1997, ATR's Brain Builder Group (BBG) expects to see the completion of 3 parallel tasks, namely the design and fabrication of the CBM (which was started in January 1997), the construction of a robot kitten called "ROBOKONEKO" (in Japanese), and the creation of a 10,000 module artificial brain architecture to control the robot kitten's many behaviors. The modules for the artificial brain will be evolved in 1998 with the CBM, and put into the (life sized) kitten robot. After 1998, the BBG hopes to work on more ambitious projects, such as household cleaner robots, and with substantially more brain builder researchers on the team. (One of de Garis's goals for Japan is to see the country create a "J-Brain Project" (J = Japan), which would aim to build a 10,000,000 module artificial brain with 2000 human "EEs" (Evolutionary Engineers) over the time period 2000-2005). 20 years from now, brain-like computers should generate a trillion dollar industry.
The Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study |
|
