Guiding Self-Organization in Systems of Cooperative Mobile Agents - Advancing Artificial Intelligence Through Biological Process Applications - page 285

Figure 11. The self-assembly of a building at various points in time: (a) t = 151 time steps: floor as-
sembling; (b) t = 919: columns assembling on completed floor; (c) t = 2253: columns complete and left
column staircase disassembling; (d) t = 2727: lower parts of door frame almost complete; (e) t = 4273:
walls assembling (note staircase on lower left); (f) t = 7914: wall assembly continues with a large block
just laid over the door and another already in place for the roof; (g) t = 12205: roof assembling; (h) t
= 14383: wall staircase disassembling.

of rules, movement control mechanisms can be
effectively reused between structures with only
minor modifications. As an example, we discuss
here the self-assembly of the building structure
shown partially complete in Figure 10, which
consists of a total of 289 blocks (52 extra blocks
were used to allow temporary structures to as-
semble). The entire building is assembled using
66 stigmergic rules (6 of which are used for dis-
assembly) and 77 variable change rules. A short

video at http://www.cs.umd.edu/~reggia/grushin.
html provides an animation of some of the stages
of the building's self-assembly via these rules.
Figure 11a shows the floor assembling. Two
columns then begin emerging from specific
locations in the floor, as shown in Figure 11b.
As these columns grow in height, some small
blocks assemble into staircases that partially wind
around the columns in order to allow other small
blocks to reach higher levels. Once a column is