Abstract
The defining characteristic of a multicellular organism is unity of purpose. In biology, the purpose is survival of the organism. The purpose of our multi-agent system is to provide a persistent computing environment in harsh conditions where repairs are difficult, or impossible. The multi-agent organism is a single entity built from logically dependent cells, where each cell is a discrete, independent hardware-processing unit. Similar to biology, each cell contains a full description of the system encoded as genes in a software genome. Cells choose which gene to express depending on internal state, the genome, and the state of neighboring cells. Gene expression involves executing a program fragment, which, when combined with all other genes in the genome, defines the full system. The multi-agent architecture provides a computing environment that adapts to unexpected changes in the hardware by reconfiguring to the new hardware without losing functionality, although performance may be affected.