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Journal of Logic and Computation 2005 15(1):21-40; doi:10.1093/logcom/exh034
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Vol. 15 No. 1, © The Author, 2005. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.

Logic, Self-awareness and Self-improvement: the Metacognitive Loop and the Problem of Brittleness

Michael L. Anderson1 and Donald R. Perlis2

1 Institute for Advanced Computer Studies, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742, USA. E-mail: anderson{at}cs.umd.edu, 2 Department of Computer Science and Institute for Advanced Computer Studies, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742, USA. E-mail: perlis{at}cs.umd.edu

This essay describes a general approach to building perturbation-tolerant autonomous systems, based on the conviction that artificial agents should be able to notice when something is amiss, assess the anomaly, and guide a solution into place. This basic strategy of self-guided learning is termed the metacognitive loop; it involves system monitoring, reasoning about, and, when necessary, altering its own decision-making components. This paper (a) argues that equipping agents with a metacognitive loop can help to overcome the brittleness problem, (b) details the metacognitive loop and its relation to ongoing work on time-sensitive commonsense reasoning, (c) describes specific, implemented systems whose perturbation tolerance was improved by adding a metacognitive loop, and (d) outlines both short-term and long-term research agendas.

Keywords: Metareasoning, time, non-monotonic reasoning, active logic, brittleness, autonomous agents

Received 5 July 2004.


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