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%A Dr. Michael L. Anderson %A Prof. Donald R. Perlis %J Journal of Logic and Computation %T Logic, self-awareness and self-improvement: The metacognitive loop and the problem of brittleness %X 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. %N 1 %K Metareasoning, time, non-monotonic reasoning, active logic, brittleness, autonomous agents %P 21-40 %V 15 %D 2005 %L cogprints3950