Slashdot Mirror
Autonomic Computing
pvcpie writes: "The New York Times has a story today about Autonomic Computing, which is described as "a biological metaphor suggesting a systemic approach to attaining a higher level of automation in computing;" and they published a paper (pdf) on the topic. Apparently there are already some universities signed up on Autonomic Computing projects, more info was available on the website and in the nyt article. It also appeared in CNET."
My high school biology teacher must've said a thousand times, "Evolution proceeds towards what works, not towards what is best."
The body works so well because it's highly highly highly redundant at the cellular level, not because there is a brilliant master control program controlling the most efficient implementation. You can't even imagine a number as big as the number of hormone receptors in your body.
That kind of duplication in a computer system costs real money, and while a noble goal, people don't spend money on reliable systems, they buy Windows.
This is a terribly useful approach in the battlefield, and the right thing to do once bandwidth and computational power are practically unlimited, but we're still in the stage of computing where people just want more features, reliability be dammed. After all, Nimda follows an autonomic behavior.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
This means that we would need modular units in a network, say, that would be autonomic. The desktop PCs would have to be autonomic before you could bet the network to truly be so.
It would be a whole new way of computer design for software, and I doubts that some of the OSs out there would have code bases that could be viable in this regard.
Note that you can do this sort of thing as an optical illusion. You can pretend that everything is doing all right, when in fact it is going to hell in a hand basket. The vaporware diagnostic that merely pretends everything is all right, or the repair that cause more damage than was present in the first place.
But I think we have had enough of that over the past decade or two to know to avoid it. And, of course, the guilty have not been named because everyone knows who they are already.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
sorry for the run-on, but that was my immediate thought when i read Paul Horn's statement that the creation of "computer systems and software that can respond to changes in the digital environment, so the systems can adapt, heal themselves and protect themselves" is the only thing which will reduce the need for "constant human maintenance, fixing and debugging of computer systems." freeing humans for higher pursuits sounds good, but is probably only likely in a utopia. Horn goes on to say "The only way to get efficiency gains in information technology is to take some of the people out." This trend sounds like the steel industry - we'll have more cost efficient processes in providing IT services, but all those educated in that field will end up working at mc donald's.
so what happens when we all forget exactly how this "autonomic software" regulates itself? i guess this is the final word in proving the importance of documentation! : ) ** begging for a flamebait mod**    or we could skip the documentation and just kidnap the children of visiting alien starships when we eventually start dying of radiation poisoning from our super-self-configuring systems.
the infamous penn state stalker server!
p.l.u.r.
The problems I discovered were:
* The building blocks of the software itself, are human optimized algorithms and datastructures;
* In order to improve human optimized algorithmns (meta-optimization?), one could develop some form of trial and error optimization algorithmn, but this would complicate things even more (it's hard to determine whether the searchdirection makes any sense); designing such algorithmn is very hard, because, how long do we search before we give up? This is like the chess game, certain move may look silly in the first place, but it could be a very good move in the end...
* If the program is to optimize smart, it will need to use *known* optimizations, and be unable to improve human optimized algorithmns... Introducing the factor of meta-optimization gives the problem of CPU-time distribution: how much CPU time may content optimization take, and how much time may met-optimization take??
* If only known algorithmns are used, the program is bound to a limited level of complexities. Meaning that: lot's of human comprehension has high complexity, which is yet not very well understood by science; the "Perfect Human Interface" is likely to fail in this area - it's the area the user (again) needs to adapt to the machine.
But if these guys actually succeed in their quest... brilliant!!
Bizar technology?
Anyway, the idea of Autonomic Computing is hardly new (consider plug-and-play and autoinstallers). The really, really hard part of it is to impose autonomic computing on a system that was not designed for it. It is very difficult to make a complex system "simple" without redesigning the complex system.
In reading this article I'm beinning to wonder if AI is going to arrive not in the form of software implementation, but in the form of a computer that's "autonomic". Think about it, the article discusses a computer that is "self healing" with no need for human maintinence. I would imagine such a system would also need limited regenitive capabilities in case hardware was damaged on a physical level, this might fall under the bracket of self replication. Think about the amount of information these machines would be handling and "autonomicly" distributing themselves.
Even limited self replication coupled with the ability to process information so rapidly and powerfully seems like borderline sentience to me. What happens when you attempt to replace an autonomic router and the computer as a whole deceides thats really something you shouldn't do, because the router is so useful. Can this be coded around or avoided altogether? The people that develop this technology are going to have to be weary of creating something that cares more about its own processes than the user trying to make use of them.
Abandon All Hope, Ye Who Enter Here
Every so often what is a reasonable, modestly interesting idea gets high high-jacked by the snake oil peddlers in whose hands it becomes the solution to the world problems.
The popular press quickly grasps on to it, as these magic bullets increase the circulation of OMNI and Scientific American. Eventually the politicians hear about them and allot untold amounts of money to these efforts.
After 5-10 years nothing much comes out of this, and the snake oil peddlers move on to another area.
Among the thusly overinflated areas we have:
- AI
- neural networks
- expert systems
- nanotechnology
- chaos theory
- e-commerce
- parallel computing
- distributed computing
- complexity (a la Santa Fe Institute) theory
- logic programming
the latest two additions are
- the semantic web
- autonomic systems
/.ers are well advised to apply a healthy dose
of skepticism to any such magic bullet claim.
More networking + more devices + more subtle, automatic behaviour of devices - human oversight = many more security holes.
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.