PM-colonies

A colony is meant to be a symbol manipulating system consisting of as simpl e as possible components which behave in a cooperative way such that the co llective competence is strictly larger (even significantly larger) than the component competences. We introduce here colonies whose agents can only pe rform point mutation (hence the abbreviation PM) transformations of the com mon string (which represents the environment of the colony), in a vicinity of the agent. In this way, important notions of this area, such as localiza tion of agents, parallelism, lack of internal representation, agent interac tion; come into stage in a very natural way. In contrast with the simplicit y of the involved agents, the behavior of PM-colonies is quite intricate: m any problems concerning the "life" of a colony are not algorithmically solv able, the number of agents in the colony or simultaneously present in the e nvironment defines infinite hierarchies of languages, etc. Such results sho w that the behavior of the PM-colonies is not predictable and that their be havior is significantly synergetic.