User-Defined Critics for Software Adaptation

"This proposal investigates using a knowledge acquisition system called The Discovery MachineT to allow subject matter experts to construct critics to evolve software. As storage, memory, and processing speeds increase there is a push to evolve morecomplex software systems. This push arises from the desire to utilize untapped computational potential. Complex software development, however, is constrained by a bottleneck facing the industry. The bottleneck is not a hardware bottleneck a la vonNeumann, but rather a bottleneck of expertise. Software development requires skilled software engineers with experience designing and implementing large software systems. Unfortunately, the demand for these engineers far exceeds the supply, and thebottleneck will only narrow as demand increases. Our solution is to reduce the role of the software engineer in the development process. This means increasing the role of the SME, which also means increasing the role of tools for assisting the SME.Since development is evolutionary in nature, SMEs will need tools for not only new development, but also for the adaptation of software. Here we suggest using a combination of user-friendly knowledge acquisition tools, high-level formal languages(SBF-TMK) and meta-agent help systems to take automated software development to the next level. The most significant development within the target business sector is the explosion in amount and complexity of data a