ABSTRACT
This chapter presents an approach to functional self-organization. Nonlinear dynamical systems give rise to many phenomena characterized by a highly complex organization of phase space, for example, turbulence, chaos, and pattern formation. The chapter is concerned with the class of systems that is, in some sense, complementary. This class contains systems that are "inherently constructive". The chapter argues that the elementary interaction among objects includes the possibility of building new objects. By "inherently constructive" the chapter emphasizes that the generation of new objects from available ones is an intrinsic, specific, non-random property of the objects under consideration. A Turing gas consists of a fixed number of function particles that are randomly chosen for pairwise collisions. When a collision is reactive, the total number of particles increases by one. To keep the number constant, one particle is chosen at random and erased from the system.
