Self-Healing Computers Still A Long Way Off

from the heal-just-a-tiny-part-of-thyself dept

It's been a few years now since IBM made a big announcement about plans for self-healing "autonomic" computing systems, and while there have been some advancements in the space, they've been slow. Business Week now has the latest report, which tries to sound up-beat, but it still seems like the advancements are still coming along quite slowly. Given the challenge involved, perhaps it's not that surprising -- but so far it's falling well short of the picture companies were painting a few years ago about computers that automatically would spot a crash or a problem, isolate it and solve it without bothering a human. So far, it looks like only the very basics have been accomplished -- adding a bit of smarts to various systems to better understand and route issues and maybe trying to give a bit of an early warning if something is really going wrong. It's good to see at least some advancements, but it sounds like the big breakthroughs are still going to take plenty of time.
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  1. identicon
    dorpus, 29 Nov 2005 @ 10:46pm

    Back in the 1980s

    they had already built microchips that could rewire themselves with tiny switches. I guess it remains uneconomical.

    link to this | view in thread ]

  2. identicon
    Logan Haynes, 30 Nov 2005 @ 8:02am

    Re: Back in the 1980s

    This is a classic touring problem. It's unsolvable.

    link to this | view in thread ]

  3. identicon
    Loganscomputer, 30 Nov 2005 @ 8:03am

    Touring problem

    This sounds like a classic touring problem, unsolvable.

    link to this | view in thread ]

  4. identicon
    Anonymous Coward, 30 Nov 2005 @ 8:33am

    No Subject Given

    Didn't Sun already start paving the way with self healing in Solaris 10?

    link to this | view in thread ]

  5. identicon
    dorpus, 30 Nov 2005 @ 9:03am

    Re: Touring problem

    Are you talking about the NP-completeness problem, or the halting problem of Turing machines?

    link to this | view in thread ]

  6. identicon
    lisa, 30 Nov 2005 @ 1:54pm

    No Subject Given

    What if the self healing dingus fails?

    link to this | view in thread ]


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