World's First (1000 Neuron) Neural Networks Evolved
at Electronic Speeds with CAM-Brain Machine (CBM)
Brain Building Era Begins
24 January 2000
Well, its been a long time coming, two steps forward, one step back, with this situation likely to continue, but on Monday 24th January 2000, Korkin, Buller and I managed to get the CBM to evolve its first neural net circuit modules. The fitnesses increased over time quite significantly, and it was exhilarating to complete a full genetic algorithm run (10,000s of circuit growths and fitness measurements) in a few seconds. Oddly though, we quickly got used to it. There are still software adjustments to be made to improve things, but these should be done within the next few weeks to months. Once these teething problems are over, we can start the real work of seeing what modules we can evolve. We need to get a feel for what the machine is capable of before we launch into multimodular brain building. Once we know what the machine can and cannot evolve (the concept of "evolvability" being critical here), we will be in a stronger position to know what multimodule systems we can build. With 2 machines installed, and one on order, the work should be distributed. Collaboration between the various groups should generate synergy. Once we have more details, they will be posted. Stay tuned. (See below).
Prof. de Garis, Dr. Korkin and Dr. Buller watching the first modules evolve at electronic speeds.
de Garis, Korkin and Buller in front of the CBM, the world's first brain building machine.
UPDATE : 15th February 2000
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The curves below show the first (firmware and software) bugfree evolutions of single neural net modules for a task where the evolved output had to follow as closely as possible an arbitrary time varying target curve. The higher the fitness, the lower the score. The red fluctuating curve shows the average fitness of the population of 100 modules (which are mutated and crossed over). The blue monotonic curve shows the fitness of the elite chromosome (which is not mutated or crossed over). Notice that most of the evolution occurs within the first 100 generations, despite the fact that the size of the chromosome is huge (nearly 100K bits). It takes about 1 second on the CBM to perform 100 generations with a population size of 100 modules.
