Adaptation and Mutation in Multi-Agent Systems and Beyond

Reconfigurable and mutable systems are increasingly more popular. As early as 1975, the Microsoft Basic interpreter for Altair contained self-modifying code, introduced to overcome resource limitations (only 4K of space available for the interpreter). A contemporary web browser is a custom application, consisting of a basic framework with multiple extension API’s and a large number of plug-ins, codecs, drivers, applets, controls, themes and other addons. These extensions are usually developed by third parties, installed/uninstalled dynamically during the lifetime of the application, and frequently changing the behavior of the application in a radical way. Some of the changes in functionality are desired, or at least approved by the user: an example of such an extension is the ability to view new media formats. Frequently, some of the effects are undesirable from the user’s point of view: some third party extensions contain spyware,pieces of code which report usage statistics and other information about the user. Occasionally, viruses and worms use the very same extension API’s.

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