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TY - GEN ID - cogprints3950 UR - http://cogprints.org/3950/ A1 - Anderson, Dr. Michael L. A1 - Perlis, Prof. Donald R. Y1 - 2005/02// N2 - This essay describes a general approach to building perturbation-tolerant autonomous systems, based on the conviction that artificial agents should be able notice when something is amiss, assess the anomaly, and guide a solution into place. We call this basic strategy of self-guided learning the metacognitive loop; it involves the system monitoring, reasoning about, and, when necessary, altering its own decision-making components. In this essay, we (a) argue that equipping agents with a metacognitive loop can help to overcome the brittleness problem, (b) detail the metacognitive loop and its relation to our ongoing work on time-sensitive commonsense reasoning, (c) describe specific, implemented systems whose perturbation tolerance was improved by adding a metacognitive loop, and (d) outline both short-term and long-term research agendas. KW - Metareasoning KW - time KW - non-monotonic reasoning KW - active logic KW - brittleness KW - autonomous agents TI - Logic, self-awareness and self-improvement: The metacognitive loop and the problem of brittleness SP - 21 AV - public EP - 40 ER -