What Happened to the "CAM-Brain Machines" (CBMs)?
After all the world wide publicity I was getting in 2000/2001 concerning the creation of the (4) CAM-Brain Machines (CBMs), (which were capable of evolving a 1000 neuron neural network circuit module in a few seconds, and then updating the neural signaling of 64000 of these modules interconnected in a gigabyte of RAM, in real time (constituting an artificial brain of nearly 100 million neurons)), a lot of people have been asking me "What happened to the CBMs?" In a nutshell, the CAM-Brain Project died prematurely, due to the bankruptcy of Starlab (Brussels, Belgium, Europe), where I was working from February 2000 to June 2001.
Starlab bought a CBM early 2000, which was delivered in the summer of 2000 - price tag, $0.5M. From the beginning, we had problems with it due to inadequate air-conditioning in the older Starlab building (before the move in November 2001
to the much bigger building), and frequently when the CBM was turned on, the power in the building would switch off. The CEO of Starlab presumably then got the impression the CBM was a dud. This was not true, because as soon as the CBM was transferred to the larger building, with proper air-conditioning and proper electrical wiring, it worked fine, but by that stage the CEO seemed to be too stressed/preoccupied to be reading my emails that the machine was working. Every time I mentioned to him that he had a contract with my HW colleague, he would explode like a petulant child. My assurances to him that the CBM was working and meeting specifications, had no effect.
The CEO did not pay my hardware colleague all of the money he had contracted to buy the CBM. My hardware colleague finally sent a very threatening email to the CEO which put his back up totally. Later, the hardware colleague switched off the CBM at Starlab. (He had internet access to the machine to update regularly its firmware). This killed the CBM research project. My hardware colleague cared more for his money than the continuation of the brain building project. This alienated me from him, so that the two of us no longer even email each other any more.
I had $100,000 of my own money invested in Starlab, i.e. the CEO, so I was hardly going to "bang my fist on the table of the CEO" to get him to pay my HW colleague (the designer of the CBM, based on my ideas). The CEO hated my HW colleague, whom I also found far too brutal.
Towards the middle of 2001, it looked as though Starlab would get a bridge loan, some of which would be used to pay off the CBM, so that my HW colleague would switch on the machine again. I went off to my summer conferences believing that the CBM payment problem would be solved on my return. What happened in fact, was that the lab went bankrupt, so my hopes of seeing the CBM up and running were dashed. In fact I only saw it running for about a month. (It really did evolve neural circuit modules in a few seconds. It was breath taking).
My main challenge now (summer 2002) is to find the money to continue this effort, but this time, the hardware design expertise is now in-house. I and my research assistants and other collaborators have become hardware programmers ourselves (using programmable chips, mainly from Xilinx). I never want to be in such a position of dependency on another person, such as my ex HW colleague, who could kill a decade's work by switching off my access to the machine.
So, if future years show that brain building is a success, then the failure of this first generation brain building machine attempt might be of interest to the historians of technology.
What happened to the 4 CBMs around the world? With my ex HW colleague no longer working on the project, there has been no progress on the machines, so they are probably gathering dust in labs in Japan (1 machine) and Europe (2 machines). The ex HW colleague has one of his own (US), so perhaps he is playing with it.
I have rather bitter feelings towards both my ex CEO and my ex HW colleague. I felt they were both responsible for the tragedy of the demise of the CBM. I was not in a good state at the time. My 2nd wife died January of 2000, so I wasnt fully functional either. Life can be tough sometimes. But, thank god for Moore's law. Even if the CBM were a great success, I would still have to build a new machine every 5 years, so by the time the 3rd or 4th generation machine is built in the future, the fate of the 1st generation machine will be irrelevant. The basic idea of building artificial brains using evolvable/programmable hardware remains very valid. It will happen. It could have happened in 2001/2002. Now it will have to be postponed for a few years while the second generation machine gets funded, designed, built and tested.