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

ATR's Evolutionary Systems Department aims to build (i.e. grow/evolve) an artificial brain by the year 2001. This artificial brain should initially contain thousands of interconnected artificial neural network modules, and be capable of controlling approximately 1000 “behaviors” in a “robot kitten”. The name given to this research project is “CAM-Brain”, because the neural networks (based on cellular automata) will be grown inside special hardware called Cellular Automata Machines (CAMs). Using a family of CAMs, each with its own processor to measure the performance quality or fitness of the evolved neural circuits, will allow the neural modules and their interconnections to be grown/evolved at electronic speeds. State of the art in CAM design is about 10 to the power 9 or 10 cells. Since a neural module of about 15 connected neurons can fit inside a cube of 100 cells on a side (1 million cells), a CAM which is specially adapted for CAM-Brain could contain thousands of interconnected modules, i.e. an artificial brain.