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not yet figured out how to make the systems
responsible for their own debugging and
improvement”.
A promising approach to solve this problem is to
provide agents with reflective capabilities. Agents
that can reflect on the effects and expected
performance of their actions are more aware and
knowledgeable of their capabilities and
shortcomings. This is called “action awareness”
(Stulp and Beetz, 2002).
Another approach is based on an “efficient
thought” concept (Hayes-Roth, 2006). This concept
lists eight steps that the most complex organizations,
in general, perform in parallel. This approach states
that the intelligent being (a) observes what’s
happening in the environment, (b) assesses the
situation for significant threats and opportunities, (c)
determines what changes would be desirable, (d)
generates possible plans to operate those changes,
(e) projects the likely outcomes of those plans, (f)
selects the best plan, and (f) communicates that plan
to key parties before implementing it. Throughout
the process, the intelligent being (g) validates and
improves its model.
The new research area that intends to solve some
of the problems pointed out is called Organic
Computing (OC). The main goal of OC is the
technical usage of principles observed in natural
systems. (Muller-Schloer, 2004).
In this paper, we introduce a computational
model for what we call “machine biological clock”
in order to make possible to build a really reflexive
environment where the system can perceive the time
flow. This concept, that has been ignored in previous
works is, in our point of view, the most important
concept that has to be considered if we plan to build
intelligent systems. Or, as said in Brachman (2002)
0, if “we want to transform them from systems that
simply react to inputs into systems that are truly, in a
word, cognitive. Most formal and intuitive
definitions tell us that cognition is about knowing.
Our image of a cognitive system, then, is one that
can indeed know things and act on that knowledge.
It can take explicit knowledge gleaned in a host of
ways and go beyond it to important implicit
knowledge, ranging from pure and simple logical
deduction to what we might call ‘plausible
reasoning’ ”.
The paper is organized as follows: a problem’s
contextualization in operating system area is
presented in section 2; a knowledge-based operating
system concept in section 3; an overview of the
biological clock concept in section 4; section 5
describes the time dimension in a KBOS system;
section 6 presents some related works and in the
conclusion section the final comments are presented
.
2 WHY A NEW CONCEPT?
In our point of view, three concepts contribute to
reduce our possibilities in building really intelligent
systems: (i) the multitasking concept, (ii) the
operator concept and, (iii) the program concept.
Traditional operating systems support the notion
of a hardware abstraction level in which each
application is supposed to possess its own processor
(and other resources). This situation and the fact
that, in general, all commercial operating systems
are based on a multitasking concept (introduced in
1964), contribute to the permanence of problems
identified 30 years ago (Linde, 1975). The problems
range from security to usability, including lack of
adequate behavior in fluctuating execution
conditions and user’s privacy (Brachman, 2002).
Today we are also faced by new demands like
pervasive computing and organic computing, where
self-adaptation and self-reconfiguring are the main
goals.
Besides that, there are two other concepts that
contribute to make things worse: (i) the operator
concept, and (ii) the program concept.
The operator function was necessary during the
first years of computing since computers were big
and difficult to use. Operators, at that time, were
responsible for turning the machine on/off, starting
programs, collecting reports, restarting programs and
so on. This scenario has changed as the computers
become smaller, cheaper and faster as they are
today. However, what was a real need in the past is
employed today as if there was no other way to
interact with computers. In fact, we are nowadays
operators – all of us using some kind of computer
(desktops, palmtops, and mobile phones). We are
trained today to learn how to pull virtual buttons the
same way the former operators were trained to pull
real buttons in real panels on those old mainframes.
This aspect has consequences and the program
concept is the main one. A program could be
thought as the programmer’s hands virtually
extended inside our machines. The programmer has
the knowledge about some specific domain and
knows how to establish the correct sequence of steps
in order to solve the problem. In this scenario, we
are users of such routines – in other words:
operators. Programs, within this context, are the way
through which programmers can implement their
procedural knowledge about the problem’s domain.
MACHINE BIOLOGICAL CLOCK - The Time Dimension in a Organic-based Operating System
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