The crazy smart kids over at MIT are working on a project titled ClearView. ClearView is a program able to monitor and self-repair unruly programs on a computer. How does it work? The program sits in the background and “monitors the behaviour of a binary”, which is the part of the program that takes in the orders and instructions which make the program do what it’s suppose to do, or what you want it to do. ClearView then creates a rule-based list of what the program is suppose to do, or how it’s suppose to act normally. When ClearView recognises that a program has strayed from this path in the form of a crash or force quit, it comes up with “patches” to force the program in line. If the program continues to deter itself, or if the patch ClearView implemented causes the program to crash, ClearView rejects it’s current one and tries a different one automatically, without any user input.

For instance, a test was done in which ClearView was told to monitor the popular Firefox web browser. During this test, ten different methods to crash the browser were attempted. On average, ClearView was able to patch and fix the program within five minutes of it’s initial problem reporting.

Source: www.technologyreview.com