The Development of Play and Self* Systems.

In this short position paper, we compare the development of cooperative play in very young humans to the very different process taken in traditional system engineering for integrating complex cyber-physical systems. The purpose is not to criticize the engineering approaches and methods we use to build self-integrating systems; the successful applications that have been accumulating speak for themselves. Rather by examining some of the clear differences in the biological development of cooperative interactions with others, we hope to raise a discussion on how we might implement more enriched environments within which systems (even abstract computational systems) can do and learn from more self-experimentation, observation of other systems, and diverse modes of interactions with others.