Can Artificial Life Emerge in a Network of Interacting Agents?

An interacting multi-agent system in a network can behave like a nature-inspired smart system (SS) exhibiting the four salient properties of an artificial life system (ALS): (i) Collective, coordinated and efficient (ii) Self-organization and emergence (iii) Power law scaling or scale invariance under emergence (iv) Adaptive, fault tolerant and resilient against damage. We explain how these basic properties can arise among agents through random enabling, inhibiting, preferential attachment and growth of a multiagent system. However,the quantitative understanding of a Smart system with an arbitrary interactive topology is extremely difficult. Hence we cannot design a general purpose programmable Smart system. However, for specific applications and a predefined static interactive topology among the agents, the quantitative parameters can be obtained through simulation to build a specific SS.