World's 4th CAM-Brain Machine (CBM)
Delivered to STARLAB, Aug 2000


I've been through this process twice now (i.e. taking delivery of a CAM-Brain Machine (CBM) sent to me by my hardware colleague Dr. Michael Korkin. The first time was in March 1999 when I was still at ATR in Kyoto. This time (August 2000) I am at Starlab, in Brussels. Since the novelty of the event was a bit stale compared to the first time, I dont need to write a lot. The photos are pretty self explanatory. One difference between the Kyoto arrival and the Brussels arrival was the presence of a television crew. This crew is filming a documentary on the theme of AI machines for Britain's Channel 4. Prof. Rod Brooks (of COG fame, at MIT) is the other main person who is being filmed for this documentary. The filming will cover a period of about 18 months starting early 2000, and will deal with the successes and failures of the attempt to build smart machines. The crew told us that we were first choice and that Brooks was second choice. Not bad huh!? - to beat out someone of Brook's reputation (Director of the AI Lab at MIT, whose Cog robot images saturate the tech mags in the US).

This CBM is the 4th to be delivered. There are 4 such machines now in the world. (There are only enough Xilinx XC6264 chips left to build 3 more. After that, the world will have to wait until the second generation machine (BM2 = brain machine 2nd generation) is built, around 2004).

With 2 of the 4 machines in Belgium, Europe is now the world leader in brain building. This idea so enthused the Brussels government that they gave us a $1 million to pursue our brain building work. Other grants have also been applied for, but as of Oct 2000, the decisions have yet to come through.

Here is a list of the CBMs and their locations.

CBM 1 - ATR Labs, Kyoto, Japan
CBM 2 - Tibotec (genomics company), Mechelen, Belgium
CBM 3 - Genobyte, Boulder, Colorado, USA
CBM 4 - Starlab, Brussels, Belgium