Robust artificial life via artificial programmed death

We propose a novel approach to self-regenerating continuously-operating systems. Such systems provide best-case solutions in security surveillance or decision making centers. We introduce HADES, a self-regenerating system whose agents acknowledge their “citizenship” or faithfulness to the good of the system and are able to monitor their environment. When agents of HADES find irregularity in themselves they first try to repair, and will self-kill if repair fails. When an agent senses that there are persistent malfunctioning agents in its environment, it sends messages to entice them to self-kill. The neighbors then proceed to generate new healthy agents to replace the killed agent. We experiment with HADES on various impairments including the most difficult one of excessive regeneration of irregular aggressive agents. These agents may use all of the system’s resources and thus take over the system, reminiscent of biologically grown tumors. We study how irregular growth may occur and then develop protocols of killing these agents to optimize the system’s longevity. While some of the inspiration is from the immune system and tumor therapy, we contribute to the field of AI by introducing protocols for system robustness via the notion of active citizenship and the fundamental property of programmed death. © 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.