Genobyte's Brain thinks for itself.

• Author: PETERSON, ERIC
• Position: Brief Article

IN a basement office on Boulder's Pearl Street Mall, a burly English bulldog named Winston snored noisily underneath a desk. just across the room, a similarly burly computer silently flexed the 74.5 million artificial neurons that earned it the distinction of being named in the 2001 Guiness Book of World Records the "World's Most Complex Artificial Brain." The lone human employee of Genobyte Inc. in the room, an unassuming-looking Ph.D. named Michael Korkin, tapped away on a laptop, demonstrating the powers of the CAM-Brain Machine.

"It is an open-ended research tool," said Korkin, Genobyte's founder and president, as he loaded a sample of the CBM's work onto his laptop. "This is not just a picture," he said of the sample, a virtual robotic cat. "It's a functional mechanical model which consists of frictions, accelerations, gravity, and other forces."

Dubbed Robokoneko (Japanese for "robot kitty"), the digital feline walked, jumped, and pranced across Korkin's monitor, displaying movements not designed by any engineer. Rather, the cat's behavior evolved within the neural network of the CBM, by way of an innovative method that melds genetic theory and supercomputing. "We treat the sequence of these motor actions for each fraction of time as a chromosome," Korkin explained, noting that the cat on the screen is the product of several thousand generations of simulated Robokonekos.

Korkin developed the CBM with a seven-member team of Genobyte employees and outside experts, funded by the Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute in Kyoto. While the initial task of the CBM was to help design next-generation artificial brains for the institute's robotics projects (such as Robokoneko), Genobyte is now marketing the machine to other cutting-edge research groups for intensive analytical applications.

"We negotiated a licensing agreement with (the institute), because they own the intellectual rights," said Korkin. "We are allowed to build them and sell them to third parties. We actually possess all the know-how."

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