The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is working on a new four-year project to create software that can update itself. The Building Resources Adaptive Software Systems (BRASS) initiative hopes to create algorithms that allow code to react to changing conditions so that it can last for a hundred years without any intervention from a developer.
“Ensuring applications continue to function correctly and efficiently in the face of a changing operational environment is a formidable challenge,” said Suresh Jagannathan, program manager at DARPA. “Failure to respond to these changes can result in technically inferior and potentially vulnerable systems. Equally concerning, the lack of automated upgrade mechanisms to restructure and transform applications leads to high software maintenance costs and premature obsolescence of otherwise functionally sound software.”
