A contingency planning system apparatus including 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 is responsive to a slipnet network and is 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 configured to monitor constraint changes thereto and propagate those changes to any related codelets. A temperature subsystem is configured to detect when temperature in the codelet workspace has reached a predetermined level indicating a satisfactory solution to the planning problem has been achieved. A plan extractor is responsive to the temperature subsystem and is 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 change the temperature in the codelet workspace such that the plurality of codelets will develop new bindings representing new solutions to the planning problem.