Editorial: Approaches and Assumptions of Self-Programming in Achieving Artificial General Intelligence

Intuitively speaking, “self-programming” means the ability for a computer system to program its own actions. This notion is clearly related to Artificial Intelligence, and has been used by many researchers. Like many other high-level concepts, however, scrutiny shows that the term can be interpreted in several different ways. To make the discussion concrete and meaningful we introduce here a working definition of self-programming. In this definition we increase its concreteness while trying to keep the intuitive meaning of the concept. The activities of a computer system usually are considered to consist of atomic actions (which can also be called instructions, operations, behavior, or something else in different contexts). At any given moment the system’s primitive actions are in a finite and constant set A, meaning that they are distinct from each other, and can be enumerated. An action may take some input arguments, and produce some output arguments. The system can execute each of its actions,