Self-Modifing Code

As I showered today, I had some ideas in my mind about code that can modify itself.

The first question that comes to my mind is:
1. What event should motivate the program to rewrite itself?
Should there be fixed intervals like, let's say, 1 minute?
Or only when a event/problem/exception occurs?
Or even something complex like a sleep pattern like humans?

2. What programming language should be used?
If you would use a language that needs to be compiled, the program would always need to carry the compiler with it.
If it shall be script language, there'll always need to be a interpreter.
But in the use case of machine code, there wouldn't be a need for anything.

3. How would it modify itself?
An artificial neural network, that will also train itself for such optimization?
A very intelligent algorithm?
Just a machine, that randomly replaces codeparts until it works?

If you came here to find answers I have to disappoint you.
Like you see in the menu, I'm a programmer, but this requires more preparation
and the company I work for doesn't work in that field of expertise.

If you have any good ideas or good sources to this topic, I'm happy to hear from you on Twitter.

2016-01-23