Technically, Stephen Thaler has written more music than any composer in the world. He also invented the Oral-B CrossAction toothbrush and devices that search the Internet for messages from terrorists. He has discovered substances harder than diamonds, coined 1.5 million new English words, and trained robotic cockroaches. Technically.

Thaler, the president and chief executive of Imagination Engines Inc. in Maryland Heights, Mo., gets credit for all those things, but he's really just ``the man behind the curtain,'' he said. The real inventor is a computer program called a Creativity Machine.

What Thaler has created is essentially ``Thomas Edison in a box,'' said Rusty Miller, a government contractor at General Dynamics and one of Thaler's chief cheerleaders.

``His first patent was for a Device for the Autonomous Generation of Useful Information,'' the official name of the Creativity Machine, Miller said. ``His second patent was for the Self-Training Neural Network Object. Patent Number Two was invented by Patent Number One. Think about that. Patent Number Two was invented by Patent Number One!''

Supporters say the technology is the best simulation of what goes on in human brains, and the first truly thinking machine.

Others say it is something far more sinister -- the beginning of ``Terminator'' technology, in which self-aware machines could take over the world.

Link to dissertation

Rat neuron cells on silicon are the brains behind a new robot—a breakthrough that may lead to better computer chips.

Steve Potter’s brand new robot would probably never make it to the second round of Battlebots. The size of a coffee mug, the cylindrical robot slides across a round meter-sized playpen on an apparently chaotic path. But this robot is a thinker, not a fighter, and it does its thinking with a network of neurons—culled from rat embryos—that resides a few feet away on an electrode-activated silicon chip.

Reverse-engineering the brain might finally lead to smarter computer.

Kwabena Boahen, a lead researcher at the University of Pennsylvania's Neuroengineering Research Laboratory, has a love-hate relationship with the gray matter between his ears. He ardently admires the subtlety of the brain's design: "Very elegant and much more efficient than anything I could come up with," he says. But for an engineer, admiration is not enough; he and his colleagues want to understand the brain's mechanisms and re-create its functions in a lab. In this effort, the elaborate nature of the neuronal programming that transforms electrical currents into thought and perception is a source of endless frustration. "Everyone is banging their heads up against this complexity issue," Boahen says.