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."
The more that can be done automatically, the more of the IT staff's precious time can be dedicated to more complex tuning tasks, and/or new development. This will make IT more effective, not obsolete.
It reboots itself.
In the end it turns out that the most complex problem arise in trying to coordinate a collection of "autonomic" (?) components. Distributed systems with unrully objects... This is what the autonomous agent community is mainly concerned with ( see the UMBC agents page or this very useful overview paper for example).
Of course IBM pushing this it might mean a kick up rear for the academic to actually get some of this potentially cool stuff working. Chances are you never want the end user to know how it works anyway.
.sig
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"
A program/database is only only as good as the knowledge of the person who has input and wrote it. If a PC thinks that to wipe it's hard drive is the best way to fix itself, I'd blame the author who wrote the maintenance program. No expert would wipe a hard drive as a general fix for a PC, and would not write these instructions into the PC.
In my opinion, part of a autonomous PC is to be self-sufficient, not act like a lemming and follow other PC's just to follow.
Plus, just as human have a basic survial instinct to survive, I think you'd write this instinct into the PC as well and not have it destroy itself (unless it was doing major harm to its master, etc. Remember Asimov's rules for robots).
Finally, I agree humans will never be replaced as the final decision maker in fixing and running PC's, servers, networks, etc., but when I was a sys admin, I'd have killed for PC's to be smart enough to do some of the basic, mundane, man-hour, labourious tasks such as upgrading Service Packs if I told them all to do it, install programs, etc. Then I could have done more fun stuff. Plus when I had to fix a problem, people weren't glad to see me, because I was only there when something went wrong. Granted they were happy someone was there to fix the problem, but all would have preferred that there was no problem in the first place (PC fixed itself).
--- RFC 1149 Compliant.
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 only way to get efficiency gains in information technology is to take some of the people out."
They're called managers.
Yeah...but does the University know about it? :-)
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?
It seems, you never looked at the code of virus programs. They are not self-maintaining or seld-tuning. Most of the time, they are even written very badly and tend to crash in unknown environments.
Actually, I have, and I know that many are very amateurish, but you come across the occasional gem - I once found a very cunning polymorphic macro virus lurking round. Funnily enough, those ones are the ones that tend to do the least damage - correlation?