Metareasoning in Adaptive Systems

Metareasoning, or reasoning about reasoning, is a process by which a system explicitly accesses (monitors and/or controls) its own reasoning. It is a widely held belief in AI that metareasoning is a cruicial part of human-level intelligence, and it could be considered part of consciousness. In this talk I will avoid such philosophical claims, and instead focus on some more practical applications of metareasoning in software systems that learn and adapt in changing environments. Specifically, I will give an overview of the basic metareasoning architecture and then discuss three systems: Augur, a classification system; GAIA, an adaptive game-playing system; and MCL, a general-purpose metareasoning shell.