Patent ID: 7484121

Claim:
A method comprising: organizing a computing system into a plurality of meta-dynamic states, the computing system having a plurality of components, each component having a plurality of microstates, the microstates of the components organized into a plurality of macrostates of the computing system, the macrostates organized into the meta-dynamic states; monitoring the computing system, such that perturbations of the computing system are detected; where a perturbation of the computing system will result in movement thereof to a new meta-dynamic state, determining whether the new meta-dynamic state is undesirable; where the new meta-dynamic state is undesirable, determining a path to cause the computing system to move back to a desirable meta-dynamic state; and, causing the computing system to move on the path to the desirable meta-dynamic state, wherein the macrostates are organized into attractors and basins of attraction, each attractor being a stable state in which the computing system is stable, and each basin of attraction being a transient state in which the computing system is unstable, but which leads to one of the attractors, said method further comprising constructing an attractor separation map indicating how the attractors are separated from one another by a plurality of hamming distances, each hamming distance being a number of bits that differ between two attractors.