Adaptive properties of living beings: Proposal for a generic mechanism.: (Self-Programming Machines III)

Living systems are capable to have appropriate responses to unpredictable environment. This kind of self-organization seems to operate as a self-programming machine, i.e. an organization able to modify itself. Until now the models of self-organization of living beings proposed are functions solutions of differential systems or transition functions of automata. These functions are fixed and these models are therefore unable to modify their organization. On the other hand, computer science propose a lot of models having the properties of adaptive systems of living beings, but all these models depend on the comparison between a goal and the results and ingenious choices of parameters by programmers, whereas there are no programmer's intention nor choice in the living systems. From two best known examples of adaptive systems of living beings, nervous system and immune system that have in common that the external signals modify the rewriting of their organization and therefore work as self-organizing machines, we devised machines with a finite set of inputs, based upon a recurrence, are able to rewrite their organization (Self-programming machines or msp) whenever external conditions vary and have striking properties of adaptation. Msp have similar properties whatever the operation defining the recurrence maybe. These results bring us to make the following statement: adaptive properties of living systems can be explained by their ability to rewrite their organization whenever external conditions vary under the only assumption that the rewriting mechanism be a deterministic constant recurrence in a finite state set. To cite this article: J.-P. Moulin, C. R. Biologies 329 (2006).