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Organically Grown Architectures: Creating Decentralized, Autonomous Systems by Embryomorphic Engineering

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Organic Computing

Part of the book series: Understanding Complex Systems ((UCS))

Summary

Exploding growth growth in computational systems forces us to gradually replace rigid design and control with decentralization and autonomy. Information technologies will progress, instead, by“meta-designing” mechanisms of system self-assembly, self-regulation and evolution. Nature offers a great variety of efficient complex systems, in which numerous small elements form large-scale, adaptive patterns. The new engineering challenge is to recreate this self-organization and let it freely generate innovative designs under guidance. This article presents an original model of artificial system growth inspired by embryogenesis. A virtual organism is a lattice of cells that proliferate, migrate and self-pattern into differentiated domains. Each cell’s fate is controlled by an internal gene regulatory network network. Embryomorphic engineering emphasizes hyperdistributed architectures, and their development as a prerequisite of evolutionary design.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Centre de Recherche en Epistèmologie Appliquée (CREA), Institut des Systèmes Complexes (ISC),CNRS and Ecole Polytechnique, 57-59, rue Lhomond, 75005 Paris, France

    René Doursat

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  1. René Doursat
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Doursat, R. (2009). Organically Grown Architectures: Creating Decentralized, Autonomous Systems by Embryomorphic Engineering. In: Organic Computing. Understanding Complex Systems. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-77657-4_8

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