Revolutionary Computer Can Reprogram Itself, No More Computer Crashes

There is nothing that can interrupt your workflow like having to restart your computer, especially when you have a dozen tabs open and you have to save each link before restarting. It’s one of the most annoying things that a computer makes us do, and I experience it at least once a week. Wouldn’t it be great if computer crashes didn’t exist, and if computers could reprogram and fix themselves when they detect a problem?

I’m sure that when computer crashes occur on a much larger scale, it’s a lot more annoying that when it happens to just one user. Apparently the world’s first self-repairing computer now exists and is functioning at University College London (UCL). According to New Scientist, it’s “a computer that mimics the apparent randomness found in nature and can instantly recover from computer crashes by repairing corrupted data.”

The way this computer works is that instead of following a list of instructions like an ordinary computer, it follows direction in a different way. It’s data is linked to specific instructions for what to do in certain situations. For example, if it’s running too hot, that data is linked to what to do to fix that problem. All of this is categorized into different organized systems.

Each one of those systems acts independently yet at the same time. None of the systems are ‘more important’ than the others, and each system only interacts with data that is related to its topic if that makes sense. According to the New Scientist article, “the systemic computer contains multiple copies of its instructions distributed across its many systems, so if one system become corrupted, the computer can access another clean copy to repair its own code.”

A traditional computer can’t access memory when the computer crashes. This computer can operate as usual when that happens since each one of these systems has its own memory. It’s a brilliant way to build a computer, there’s no doubt about that!