Metacomputation: MST plus SCP

First of all I want to thank the organizers of this seminar for inviting me to review the history and the present state of the work on supercompilation and metasystem transitions I believe that these two notions should be of pri mary importance for the seminar because they indicate the lines of further development and generalization of the two key notions most familiar to the participants supercompilation is a development and generalization of par tial evaluation while metasystem transition is the same for selfapplication For myself however the order of appearance of these keywords was oppo site I started from the general concept of metasystem transition MST for short and my consequent work in computer science has been an application and concretization of this basic idea History Consider a system S of any kind Suppose that there is a way to make some number of copies of it possibly with variations Suppose that these systems are united into a new system S which has the systems of the S type as its subsystems and includes also an additional mechanism which somehow examines controls modies and reproduces the Ssubsystems Then we call S a metasystem with respect to S and the creation of S a metasystem transition As a result of consecutive metasystem transitions a multilevel hierarchy of control arises which exhibitss complicated forms of behavio