Fans of self-aware AI may be interested in following up on the trail
established by AM and Eurisko, Doug Lenat's early programs for evolving
heuristics useful in a particular domain of interest. Cyrano is a
"thoughtful reimplemenation" of Eurisko, by Ken Haase. (Lenat was one
of the his thesis advisors.) His PhD thesis describing Cyrano is online
at http://www.media.mit.edu/~haase/thesis/thesis.html.
Haase's home page http://www.media.mit.edu/~haase describes a distributed database for AI research called FramerD which he is giving away for free for research purposes. Maybe he would be willing to similarly share his Cyrano sources if you asked him. You could read the thesis first to see if it sounds like something which would be useful as a foundation for your AI.
Hal