Distributed Self-evolving Groups

Summary of Research


This page describes the DARPA-funded research effort in the project Distributed Self-evolving Groups, which is funded under DARPA's IC&V research program. The principal investigator is David H. Ackley.

As group activity is increasingly mediated by computers, and as computer languages and systems are increasingly needing to handle distributed computations and heterogeneous resources, there is an emerging potential for a synergy between the rules governing a given group's behavior and the rules governing a distributed computation.

This project is conducting research to unite these two domains, producing a prototype evolvable rule system for supporting group activity involving both human and computational agents. The goal is to extend the principles of distributed computation upward to meet the typically informal procedures used by working groups, while extending planning language down into a more-directly executable form.

The project's major focus is the Group-Evolvable Processes challenge of DARPA's IC&V program.


This project is a component of the ccr project, which is investigating the application of biological, ecological, and generally `life-like' concepts to the theory, design, construction, maintenance, and evolution of computation and communications systems.
David H. Ackley UNM Computer Science <ackley@cs.unm.edu>