eurisko was the first truly self-enhancing AI, created by Douglas B. Lenat. eurisko was composed of heuristics . heuristics could modify heuristics, including the heuristics which modified heuristics. eurisko's source code isn't available, but, it turns out that eurisko's "heuristics" were arbitrary pieces of LISP code eurisko could modify heuristics because it possessed "heuristics" which acted by splicing, modifying, or composing - in short, mutating - pieces of LISP code. many times this would result in a new "heuristic" which caused a LISP exception, but eurisko would simply discard the failed heuristic and continue. in a sense, eurisko was the first attempt at a http://www.singinst.org/seedAI/seedAI.html seed AI - although it was far from truly self-swallowing, possessed no general intelligence, and was created from crystalline components http://www.foresight.org/EOC/EOC_Chapter_5.html#section03of06
and http://perso.wanadoo.fr/starynkevitch/basile/qish_intro.html">Qish
started looking at qish - (needs cocom which looks interesting as is " This is COCOM tool set oriented onto the creation of compilers, cross-compilers, interpreters, and other language processors. The distribution also contains interpreter of language DINO as an example of the tool set usage.)
also CCG (a dynamic assembler or machine instruction generator)
http://www.cs.caltech.edu/research/ic/transit/tn87/tn87.html