Contemporary Cybernetics

Automatic software systems are being developed. Many commercial organizations give little encouragement to their research groups who attempt to work in this area. There still seems to be an air of unreality about the concept of computers that can not only design their successors, but also produce automatically the software they will require and subsequently maintain it. It is still a science fiction idea in the minds of many computer scientists. But simulation of machines by machines is hardly new, and the production of new software by simulation, or compiler‐compiler, or self compiling methods is not a revolutionary process.