ABSTRACT
Compare the ‘firing squad’ problem where a chain of soldiers, each able to exchange information with his two neighbours, must ‘come to an agreement’ and fire their guns simultaneously. The system must be self-designed, utilizing its trials and its failures as the only source of information from which to organize itself into an appropriate stimulus-response pattern, meaning by this a pattern giving effective control over the apparatus. The pattern formed in the array of boxes shows about 50% symmetry in the initial random configuration and an increasing degree of symmetry as boxes gain more information on which to base their decisions. A definite cost to be attached to each failure during the pattern-building process, the design objective is a system which can attain a pattern of the required type at the expense of as few failures as possible.
