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Social Intelligence for Computers 87[20], or by having intentions towards the others [11]. In such an organisation,agents can choose whether or not to cooperate with the others but have no abilityto make choices about their social life by, for example, choosing with whomthey can interact, and on which topic. This limitation is often justified by theneed for stability.However, for some people it is important that relations can evolve over time,since not all agents in the network are reliable [18]. Some of these systems aredesigned so that the relations between agents evolve and agents build representationsabout their network. Whenever an agent engages in some work for orwith another, both can change their point of view on the relation, and each onecan decide whether to stop the interaction or reinforce some weaker link.This form of learning could help in addressing the question of social orderin a deeper way, but it is usually used in networks where the agents alreadyknow the whole group at the beginning or can get in touch with any other.Thus these systems don’t display one of the main characteristics of social life,which is openness. This property is the ability to accept newcomers into agroup, to have them be integrated into the usual activities and judged as theothers are. This openness has often recognised as a very important question forMAS [4]. Some systems were hence designed with the aim of dealing with thatopenness. MadKit [13] is one of them: in this system agents are divided intocommunication groups. Most of the agents belong to just one group and are notnecessarily aware that there exist other agents with whom they don’t interact.Communication between groups is very important and is done by representativeagents; these also receive requests from agents who are outside the group andask for entry. If accepted, the requesting agent is allowed to be a normal agentamong the others.Although being quite open, the organisation is necessarily based on strongassumptions about the agents and their ability to interact. Agents still havepredefined goals, the idea that they can ask for help is already implemented,and they express their needs to the others in a direct way (i.e they know withwhom they are to communicate and how to interpret the messages from them).This implies at least a common language and similar cognitive processes. Thisreduces the flexibility of the evolving social life.There is a different approach in MAS - one that draws its inspiration fromsocieties of simple animals, rather than using linguistic metaphors of communication.This choice of bottom-up perspective is often referred to as "ecoresolution"and can exhibit quite complex social patterns that can be seriouslyvalidated [9]. It is possible to build systems where each agent has no globalknowledge, communication between agents is not direct but takes place throughthe environment and the fulfilment of tasks mainly relies on self-organisingproperties of the system. Each agent acts with reflexes that are provoked by thediscovery of stimuli in the environment, and the intensity and position of these