Building China's Artificial Brain Using an Evolved Neural Net Module Approach

Prof. Hugo de Garis has recently received a 3 million RMB, 4 year grant to build China's first artificial brain, starting in 2008, that will consist of approximately 15,000 interconnected neural net modules, evolved one at a time in a special accelerator board (1) (which is 50 times faster than using an ordinary PC) to control the hundreds of behaviors of an autonomous robot. The approach taken in building this artificial brain is fast and cheap (e.g. $1500 for the FPGA board, $1000 for the robot, and $500 for the PC, a total of $3000), so we hope that other brain building groups around the world will copy this evolutionary engineering approach.