Emergent computation refers to systems in which global informationprocessing appears as a result of the interactions among manycomponents, each of which may be a system that exhibits an ability foremergent computation at a different level of self-organisation. In thispaper we employ a modification of cellular programming to evolvecellular machines for synchronisation. This allows global computation tooccur by many local interactions among computational demes ofinteracting cells. The computational machine, derived from thenon-uniform cellular automata model, consists of a grid of cells whichare co-evolved in isolated demes. We describe experiments which showthat demes can be co-evolved to perform non-trivial computation. We alsoanalyse the mechanisms of computation within the different synchronisingdemes. Our results not only show that the co-evolution of demes ispossible, but that they can attain high computational performancethrough co-operative action
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