The Meaning of Adaptation: Mastering the Unforeseen?

摘要

This short paper gives an introduction to a panel held as part of the track on 'Rigorous Engineering of Collective Adaptive Systems' at ISOLA 2018. The discussion was structured on the basis of twenty questions ranging from the evolution and universality of autonomous systems to correctness, reliability, and legal issues. 'Do you consider adaptivity to be a realistic and desirable property of technical systems?', 'what is the new challenge in software engineering for the design and implementation of adaptive systems?', 'why should artificial intelligence open new horizons to implement adaptivity?', 'can we expect machines to adapt by evolution?' as well as 'is there a mathematical characterisation of adaptation?' were some of the questions that were considered. For all questions, the paper also indicates related work.