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ATR artificial brain project: 2004 progress report

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Abstract

This article presents the key assumptions and current status of the ATR Artificial Brain Project being undertaken to create Volitron, a device equipped with circuitry that enables the emergence of thought. Such thought would be recognized from Volitron's specific communication behaviors. The project consists of three complementary themes: psychodynamic architecture, brain-specific evolvable hardware, and the management of brain-building. The psychodynamic architecture is designed to develop automatically, driven by “pleasure” coming from discharges of tension gathered in special tension-accumulating devices. Tension-discharging patterns come first of all from the robot's interactions with its care giver/provider. For the dedicated hardware, we developed qcellular-automata (qCA), in which groups of uniform logic primitives (q-cells) serve as spike-train-processing units, as well as pulsed para-neural networks (PPNN) that can be evolved, using fuzzified signals and a genetic algorithm combined with hill climbing, and converted into qCA. The psychodynamic ideas were tested using three robots: Neko, equipped with a pleasure-driven associator, Miao, equipped with MemeStorms (a special working memory in which conflicting ideas fight for access to the long-term memory and actuators), and Miao+, whose brain is equipped with a growing neural network.

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Correspondence to Andrzej Buller.

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This work was presented in part at the 9th International Symposium on Artificial Life and Robotics, Oita, Japan, January 28–30, 2004

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Buller, A., Joachimczak, M., Liu, J. et al. ATR artificial brain project: 2004 progress report. Artif Life Robotics 9, 197–201 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10015-005-0345-9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10015-005-0345-9

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