“CAM-Brain” ATR´s billion neuron artificial brain project: a three year progress report

This paper reports on progress made in the first 3 years of ATR´s CAM-Brain Project, which aims to use evolutionary engineering techniques to build/grow/evolve a RAM-and-cellular-automata based artificial brain consisting of thousands of interconnected neural network modules inside special hardware such as MIT´s Cellular Automata Machine CAM-8, or NTT´s Content Addressable Memory System CAM-System. The states of a billion (later a trillion) 3D cellular automata cells, and millions of cellular automata rules which govern their state changes, can be stored relatively cheaply in giga(tera)bytes of RAM. After 3 years work, the CA rules are almost ready. MIT´s CAM-8 (essentially a serial device) can update 200 million CA cells a second. It is likely that NTT´s CAM-System (essentially a massively parallel device) will be able to update a hundred billion CA cells a second. Hence all the ingredients will soon be ready to create a revolutionary new technology which will allow thousands of evolved neural network modules to be assembled into artificial brains. This in turn will probably create not only a new research field, but hopefully a whole new industry, namely brain building. Building artificial brains with a billion neurons is the aim of ATR´s 8 year CAM-Brain research project, ending in 2001