Andrew, Alex M. “The Goore Game and Daisyworld—Substrates for Self-Organization.” In Cybernetics and Systems’ 86 , pp. 435-442. Springer, Dordrecht, 1986.
Much thinking under the heading of Cybernetics has been concerned with self-organization, a rather ill-defined but nevertheless important idea. A self-organizing system modifies itself during interaction with an environment so as to come to display behaviour which is, in some sense, advantageous or “expedient”. It is clearly desirable to study self-organization in simple situations, both because they are easier to think about and because they may indicate how properties conducive to complex self-organization were evolved in natural systems. A number of alternative environments, or substrates for simple self-organization, are compared here, namely neural nets, populations of simple automata, and an environment with continuous variables termed “Daisyworld” by Lovelock.