Intelligent System Architectures with Wrappings

The context of this problem is the System Engineering of Constructed Complex Systems, which are artificially constructed systems that are managed or mediated by computing systems. In particular, we are concerned with autonomous intelligent behavior in such systems, which means that the system takes a major role in selecting its own goals. When Constructed Complex Systems operate autonomously, whether out in the real world or in cyberspace, they need a great deal of flexibility and adaptability in their architecture and implementation. This paper shows how to organize and implement a Constructed Complex System to have the requisite qualities needed for autonomy while avoiding the most common difficulties found in computing systems : rigidity and brittleness.

Our architecture includes both our Wrapping infrastructure to provide a Computationally Reflective base for all component integration, and our conceptual categories to provide a flexible representation mechanism that separates model structures from the roles they play.

To make things even more interesting, we are currently developing approaches whereby the system also decides for itself when it needs to be re-organized, because its fundamental symbol systems are not expressive enough, and carries out the reorganization automatically, by defining new symbol systems and re-expressing itself in the new terms. This behavior is hard to implement, but we have identified many of the important issues.

There are several fundamental mathematical questions involved in this study: (1) how self-reference can be made not only possible but sensibly computable, (2) how formal mathematical structures can be extended to incorporate more information about context and situation, (3) how to move formal structures into new contexts and assess the resulting validity, (4) how to define mathematical structures before their basic elements are defined, (5) how to capture more of the modeling processes in mathematical structures, (6) how to decide when a notational system is inadequate, and (7) how to fix it.