1. A contingency planning system apparatus comprising: a world description subsystem responsive to data representing a description of the world related to a planning problem and configured to instantiate a plurality of world codelets in a codelet workspace; a coderack subsystem responsive to a slipnet network and configured to instantiate a plurality of codelets in the codelet workspace each having one or more slots for binding with binding sites of lower level codelets and each configured to monitor constraint changes thereto and propagate those changes to any related codelets; a temperature subsystem configured to detect when temperature in the codelet workspace has reached a predetermined temperature indicating a satisfactory solution to the planning problem has been achieved; and a plan extractor responsive to the temperature subsystem and configured to extract one or more contingency plans from the codelet workspace when the predetermined temperature is reached and configured to cause the temperature subsystem to change the temperature in the codelet workspace such that the plurality of codelets will develop new bindings representing new solutions to the planning problem.