Do Living Artefacts need chaos for growing up?

Many research works in robotics and autonomous systems are focused on getting an agent to learn to do some task such as recognizing an object or reaching a specific place. The task can be learned, but in most of these works the robot's task was predefined by the researcher. The next logical step is to project an autonomous robot that can dive in unpredictable environments[1]. That means to investigate how robots that are capable of `growing up' through experience can be designed. Living systems, starting from a pre-structured set of functions, develop competence to better adapt to the environment all life long. They present multiple levels of organization, with elements at one level interacting and aggregating to create more complex behaviour at a higher level. Many recent investigations on the spatio-temporal activity in living being showed the presence of features common to the behaviour of self organizing dynamical systems [2], [3]. Thus a question arise: "is this chaos useful for growing up?" In this paper we present and discuss that question, and we try to give some indication for a possible answer, with the aim of defining the basic features of a behavioural kernel for growing up artefacts . [1] Adams, B. Breazeal, C. R. Brooks and B. Scassellati. Humanoid Robots: a new kind of tool. Humanoid Robotics. 2000 [2]Freeman, W. J. (1991). The physiology of perception. Scientific American, 264, 78-85. [3]DiPrimio ,F.,Müller ,B.S..Lengeler, (2000) ,"Minimal Cognition in Unicellular Organisms" in: J.A. Meyer, A. Berthoz, D. Floreano, H. L. Roitblat and S. W. Wilson (Eds). Proceedings Supplement, International Society for Adaptive Behaviour, Honolulu, pp. 3-12