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Recent developments in information technology have brought about important changes in distributed computing. New environments such as massively large-scale, wide-area computer networks and mobile ad hoc networks have emerged. Common characteristics of these environments include extreme dynamicity, unreliability, and large scale. Traditional approaches to designing distributed applications in these environments based on central control, small scale, or strong reliability assumptions are not suitable for exploiting their enormous potential. Based on the observation that living organisms can effectively organize large numbers of unreliable and dynamically-changing components (cells, molecules, individuals, etc.) into robust and adaptive structures, it has long been a research challenge to characterize the key ideas and mechanisms that make biological systems work and to apply them to distributed …