After I came to know Jerne's network theory on the immune system, I became fascinated with the immune system as an information system. The main pro totypes for biological information systems have been the neural systems and the brain. However, the immune system is not only an interesting informa tion system but it may provide a design paradigm for artificial information systems. With such a consideration, I initiated a project titled "autonomous decentralized recognition mechanism of the immune network and its applica tion to distributed information processing" in 1990 under a Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research on a Priority Area ("Autonomous Distributed Systems") supported by the Ministry of Education, Science, and Culture. During the project, I promoted the idea that the immune system could be a prototype of autonomous distributed systems. After the project, we organized an international workshop on immunity based systems in 1996 in conjunction with the International Conference on Multi-Agent Systems held in Kyoto, Japan. Recently, there have been several international conferences related to topics inspired by the immune system and an increasing number of research papers related to the topic. In writing this book, a decade after the project, I still believe that the immune system can be a prototype, a compact but sophisticated system that nature has shown us for building artificial information systems in this network age of the twenty-first century."

This book describes the struggle to introduce a mechanism that enables next-generation information systems to maintain themselves. Our generation observed the birth and growth of information systems, and the Internet in particular. Surprisingly information systems are quite different from conventional (energy, material-intensive) artificial systems, and rather resemble biological systems (information-intensive systems). Many artificial systems are designed based on (Newtonian) physics assuming that every element obeys simple and static rules; however, the experience of the Internet suggests a different way of designing where growth cannot be controlled but self-organized with autonomous and selfish agents. This book suggests using game theory, a mechanism design in particular, for designing next-generation information systems which will be self-organized by collective acts with autonomous components. The challenge of mapping a probability to time appears repeatedly in many forms throughout this book. The book contains interdisciplinary research encompassing game theory, complex systems, reliability theory and particle physics. All devoted to its central theme: what happens if systems self-repair themselves?

After I came to know Jerne's network theory on the immune system, I became fascinated with the immune system as an information system. The main pro totypes for biological information systems have been the neural systems and the brain. However, the immune system is not only an interesting informa tion system but it may provide a design paradigm for artificial information systems. With such a consideration, I initiated a project titled "autonomous decentralized recognition mechanism of the immune network and its applica tion to distributed information processing" in 1990 under a Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research on a Priority Area ("Autonomous Distributed Systems") supported by the Ministry of Education, Science, and Culture. During the project, I promoted the idea that the immune system could be a prototype of autonomous distributed systems. After the project, we organized an international workshop on immunity based systems in 1996 in conjunction with the International Conference on Multi-Agent Systems held in Kyoto, Japan. Recently, there have been several international conferences related to topics inspired by the immune system and an increasing number of research papers related to the topic. In writing this book, a decade after the project, I still believe that the immune system can be a prototype, a compact but sophisticated system that nature has shown us for building artificial information systems in this network age of the twenty-first century."

This book describes the struggle to introduce a mechanism that enables next-generation information systems to maintain themselves. Our generation observed the birth and growth of information systems, and the Internet in particular. Surprisingly information systems are quite different from conventional (energy, material-intensive) artificial systems, and rather resemble biological systems (information-intensive systems). Many artificial systems are designed based on (Newtonian) physics assuming that every element obeys simple and static rules; however, the experience of the Internet suggests a different way of designing where growth cannot be controlled but self-organized with autonomous and selfish agents. This book suggests using game theory, a mechanism design in particular, for designing next-generation information systems which will be self-organized by collective acts with autonomous components. The challenge of mapping a probability to time appears repeatedly in many forms throughout this book. The book contains interdisciplinary research encompassing game theory, complex systems, reliability theory and particle physics. All devoted to its central theme: what happens if systems self-repair themselves?