Active Loop Programming for Adaptive Systems

Abstract

We describe a new approach to adaptive system construction, based on our belief that there are no one-way functions in biology. For example, no sensor is a one-way input device, and no effector is a one-way output device. We choose to mimic the fact that all biological systems have many active processing loops running at all times, at various different time and space scales, and all of them both produce and consume data. We wanted to see how far this notion can carry us towards highly adaptive computational systems, in combination with computational reflection and certain other biological principles of organization. We show that it carries us surprisingly far, by describing a system architecture that uses it as a fundamental organizing principle. We define what active loop programming is, show how it provides enormous flexibility in a software-intensive system, and show how it can be implemented with Wrappings, our integration infrastructure for self-modeling systems.