DARPA Aims to Create Software That Can Evolve Over 100 Years

 DARPA  

DARPA's new Building Resource Adaptive Software Systems (BRASS) project looks to overcome the challenges of obsolescence by developing software systems that can still change and continue to operate properly for a hundred years.

DARPA ha recently published a request for proposals on how to design software than that can adapt on its own. Not only would such software’s core function evolve and change over time, but it would be able to survive both new and crumbling physical infrastructure.

The program is known as BRASS—Building Resource Adaptive Software Systems.The agency is expecting to build everything from the ground up. In return, though, we could see a whole new list of programs with longer lifespans that are easier to maintain.

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According to the agency, the goal of the BRASS program is to "realize foundational advances in the design and implementation of survivable, long-lived complex software systems that are robust to changes in the resources (logical or physical) provided by their operational environment."

“Technology inevitably evolves, but very often corresponding changes in libraries, data formats, protocols, input characteristics and models of components in a software ecosystem undermine the behavior of applications,” said Suresh Jagannathan, DARPA program manager. “The inability to seamlessly adapt to new operating conditions undermines productivity, hampers the development of cyber-secure infrastructure and raises the long-term risk that access to important digital content will be lost as the software that generates and interprets content becomes outdated.”

BRASS will be operated on the premise is that an entirely new clean-slate approach to software design, composition and adaptation is required. This approach aims to enable the expression and discovery of new kinds of specifications, program analyses and formal methods that precisely capture the relationship between computations and the resources they use, and algorithmic transformations that enable applications to adapt to changes without the need for extensive programmer involvement.

According to Jagannathan, BRASS could lead to the construction of families of programs all generally preserving high-level functionality but with different implementations that are optimized for different sets of resources and expose opportunities for cost reduction.

BRASS could ultimately lead to the development of computers and other devices that don't need to stop running for upgrades, or could this be the technology that makes it possible for future artificial intelligence to gain potentially dangerous recursive self-improvement?


SOURCE  DARPA

By 33rd Square

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