1. A self-adaptive system for providing progressively improved solutions to successive examples of a class of generally similar problems of resource allocation, comprising: a supervisory and interaction management module (SIMM) for receiving input data describing the goals to be met in solution of, and the resources available to solve, a particular problem; a short-term memory (STM) for receiving said input data from said SIMM, for receiving a list of candidate resources from long-term memory, and for comparing the input data to the candidate resources to determine a near-optimal resource allocation; a long-term memory (LTM) maintaining a list of candidate resources and associated probabilities of goal satisfaction, said LTM being effectively implemented as a reconfigurable network of nodes connected to neighboring nodes by links, each node representing a step in a pathway connecting one or more resources to one or more goals, means for computing alternate pathways between the nodes of the network in order to allocate resources to goals in deriving candidate solutions of each particular problem of said class of problems, and for evaluating the relative efficiency of each of the alternate pathways thus computed in order to determine an optimum solution for that particular problem with respect to the present configuration of the network; means for identifying common groups of nodes connected by links employed in the optimum solutions of plural examples of problems from a given class of problems; and means for effectively decomposing said network by replacing said identified common groups of nodes connected by links with fewer nodes connected by fewer links to one another, or to the nodes previously connected to the identified common group of nodes, for subsequent solution of further problems from said given class of problems.