How to design a program that can teach itself and grow in autonomously?

[junfanbl]

Is it possible to design a program that can learn? I have done some reading on programs that can learn and it seems that the bases on these designs are on user input and the pattern of user input. From my experience (which isn't much), when designing applications, the intelligence of your application comes down to how much logic you include. However, I have had thoughts about designing a program that can teach itself to write it's own code and compile on the fly. I know that sounds like something out of a science fiction movie, but I don't think it is impossible.

 

[IRstuff]

Read up on neural nets and expert systems. However, neither is remotely comparable to even a child's brain.

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[itsmoked]

The company I started at at the dawn of the microcontroller was writing programs that altered themselves using the 8032! The prior product used the 8008.

The last several issues of Circuit Cellar Magazine has been running a fascinating multipart article on Evolutionary Robotics and Genetic Algorithms. The author (Krawec) uses simulated robots so he doesn't have to build expensive hardware to test and refine the self programming and learning the robots operate on. It also allows him to run dozens of robots in simulation at the same time.

It's a very clear article and the author includes everything you need on the Circuit Cellar's website to modify and run and analyze the robotic code.

I can't think of a better starting point for you to learn about self programming code/applications. It would be well worth it for you to track down the first article in the series too.

Keith Cress
kcress -

http://www.flaminsystems.com

 

[MacGyverS2000]

Possible? Yes.

Feasible (at least for a typical user)? No.

I did a bit of neural net design (both hardware and software) back when it was becoming the fad. Self-modifying programs have been around for quite a good number of years, but in the beginning they weren't really for neural nets... they were simply for creating programs that handled certain edge cases more gracefully. Debugging those was... interesting.

Simple, self-modifying code is easy enough to write... getting it to do something useful is another story.

Dan - Owner

http://www.Hi-TecDesigns.com

 

[xwb]

Depends what you want it to learn. It can learn things as long as there are rules and few anomalies. It is next to impossible to learn anything with lots of anomalies and no rules. The learning on a computer is also very specific.

 

[junfanbl]

xwb can you please define what an anomaly might be with an example?

 

[IRstuff]

an anomaly is an unexpected event, like possibly, a floating point input where integer was expected, or where an 80-character max was expected, but 81 arrived.

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[AlbertStructural]

Interesting and my fav topic. One of my friend was doing MS in electrical engineering with thesis on design of neural networks and artificial intelligence (AI). His works were quite interesting and there has been lot of work done in this field though maybe trillionth of a complexity of a child human brain. Neural networks are like our brain wiring but in programmatic way. They "learn" from bombardment of similar events with small variations and then judging the outcomes.