A tiny Perth, Western Australia company that went bust way back in 1987, but was resurrected to pursue the dream of a radically new computer architecture modeled on the human brain, demonstrated a prototype of the machine in New York last week, and is heading for a Nasdaq listing with a pitch for $50m. The company is called Formulab Neuronetics Corp Ltd, the machine is called the Richter Paradigm Computer and it is built around an array of MIPS Technologies Inc R-series RISC microprocessors. And that is where the problems begin: are we talking about $1,000 R1000s or $75 R3000s? Ask how many, and you get the remarkably unscientific answer dozens (perhaps it executes duodecimal rather than binary arithmetic), and on performance, the company says only that it is many times faster and more flexible than existing personal computers, – but then most real computers fit that description. And most real computers probably match the description 180 times faster than a 166MHz Pentium, another of the company’s less than persuasive claims. The machine could be dismissed as the work of charlatans and cranks were it not that over the past couple of years, the company has won agreements with companies ranging from Hughes Aircraft Co through Siemens Business Communications Systems Inc to Goldtron Ltd of Singapore, which clearly take it very seriously. The architecture is claimed to implement an object-specific computer architecture and addressing system that together provides speed, flexibility, and fault-tolerance. The programming concept is intriguing but again opaque: the company claims the machine can be programmed by novices in hours using a highly intuitive, visual-oriented user interface. The Richter Paradigm View software is claimed to enable programs to be constructed simply by connecting cells, on- screen, in a way that models human decision-making, using fuzzy logic techniques. Anthony Richter, international executive chairman of Formulab, describes the Richter Paradigm Computer as The world’s first general-purpose reasoning platform based on a distributed and parallel model of interconnected processing, and suggests it has the potential to displace traditional computers within a decade, which sounds unlikely. The company is offering the computer as a stand-alone machine, which is intended to be ready sometime in 1997, and also in the form of the Richter Paradigm Neurocard, a PCI bus board that plugs into a personal computer and is said to be almost ready. The computer starts at $3,000 – Associated Press says $6,000, but every report you read of the company seems to contradict the last one in some way, the board is available for $300 and the software is $90.
