Modular self-organization

This paper addresses the problem of building a long-living a utonomous agent; by long-living, we mean that this agent has a large number of relatively complex and varying tasks to perform. Biology sugge sts some ideas about the way animals deal with a variety of tasks: brains are made of specialized and complementary areas/modules; skills are spre ad over modules. On the one hand, distributing functions and representation s has immediate advantages: parallel processing implies reaction speed-u p; a relative independence between modules gives more robustness. Both prope rties might clearly increase the agent's efficiency. On the other hand, th e fact of distributing a system raises a fundamental issue: how does the o rganization process of the modules happen during the life-time? 1 There has been much research about the design of modular inte lligent architectures (see for instance [15] [5] [1] [7]). It is neve rtheless very often the (human) designer who decides the way modules are connect ed to each other and how they behave with respect to the others.