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This paper presents a programming language that species a robust process for shape formation on a sheet of identically programed agents, by combining local organization primitives from epithelial cell orphogenesis and Drosophila cell differentiation with combination rules from geometry. This work represents a significantly different approach to the design of self-organizing systems: the desired global shape is specified using an abstract geometry-based language, and the agent program is directly compiled from the global specification. The resulting self-assembly process is extremely reliable in the face of random agent distributions, random agent death and varying agent numbers, without relying on global coordinates or centralized control.
Radhika Nagpal (Mon,) studied this question.