DARPA's latest program will create evolving Skynet-like software

DARPA has some new plans up its sleeve, and they sound uncomfortably similar to SKYNET. Building Resource Adaptive Software Systems (BRASS) is the program, and it involves building software systems able to both survive for more than a century and adapt as needed to facilitate that — essentially, DARPA wants to create software able to recognize changes in a related ecosystem and "safely and dynamically incorporate optimized, tailored algorithms and implementations" in response.

Technology changes rapidly, and that is a reason DARPA is looking to create software that can weather those changes. The BRASS program has numerous objectives that are being spread out in three phases, with each phase being set to last for 16 months.

Some of these objectives include making the adaptation ability available to a large percentage of a code base of an app and ecosystem, as well as reducing the time it takes to fix issues and port functionality from human-related time spans to machine time.

DARPA also wants to cut quite a bit of the runtime monitoring and analytics by replacing them with "adaptive solutions" that'll be able to keep operating in continuously changing environments. Some of the benefits of this include reducing costs.

SOURCE: Network World