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Marvin Minsky's Society of the Mind , which speculates that intelligence is an emergent property of sub-intelligent components he calls agents. The example he starts with is "put together blocks to form a tower", an intelligent behavior formed of parts such as "decide on a starting place", "find a block", "is this block already part of the tower", "pick up the block" and so forth. These behaviors can be broken down into smaller bits--"decide on a starting place" would include things like "is it flat?", "is it solid?", "are there blocks available nearby?", "can I reach it?" and so on.