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."

Comments

single cell systems, etc.

[Alien54]

You need to remeber even a single cell has the equivalent of Autonomic functions that are used to keep going. It does not probbably do the equivalent of deciding "shall I digest food now?"

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.

Remember that one ST:TNG...

[callmegracie]

...where the Enterprise came upon the race that had built very complex, self-sustaining technology and were able to devote themselves to "higher pursuits", like art and music, but who were unable to fix the problems that eventually developed because there was no one left who remembered how everything worked?

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** &nbsp&nbsp 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!

Some academic thoughts...

[drnomad]

Reading books about Fuzzy Logic, Artificial Life and so on, I played a mind game, designing this "software" few years ago (and many others have I'm sure!).

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!!