GROWING AN ARTIFICIAL BRAIN : The Genetic Programming of Million-Neural-Net-Module Artificial Brains within Trillion Cell Cellular Automata Machines

This paper reports on progress made in the first year of an eight year research project which aims to build/grow/evolve (at electronic speeds) an artificial brain which contains a billion neurons inside a Cellular Automata Machine (CAM). This paper introduces the CAM-Brain concept, discusses some implementation issues, and justifies how it should be possible to build artificial brains containing a billion neurons by the year 2001. If successful, the CAM-Brain research project should provide a powerful, if not revolutionary, new tool for the study of behavior, because the project intends to evolve a CAM-Brain which is capable of controlling roughly 1000 "behaviors" in a robot kitten. Since it is unlikely that all these behaviors will be evolved in one step, the CAM-Brain project will need to focus its attention upon the issue of "incremental evolution," i.e., how does one add neural modules to an already functional nervous system, so as to increase its functionality.