The Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence has launched the Flare programming language project, headed by programmer Dmitriy Myshkin.

Flare is proposed as a fundamentally new programming language expected to be useful for AI research (among other uses). “Program objects and program code can be represented as well-formed XML, enabling a wide variety of new design patterns and language idioms,” says the announcement.

“Current programming tools for AI are inadequate,” says Singularity Institute researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky. “Flare, an extensible language easily modifiable by Flare programs, will let us write more powerful tools, and will let the AI introspect and tinker with its own source code, without our needing to become compiler and interpreter specialists.”

The Singularity Institute has embarked on a long-term quest to develop real AI, and eventually, “recursively self-improving AI, Friendly AI, and transhuman AI,” he added.