Self-repair Ability of a Toroidal and Non-toroidal Cellular Developmental Model

This paper is part of a larger project whose main objective is to demonstrate experimentally that the following hypothesis holds:

computational developmental systems on a cellular structure are a) naturally fault-tolerant and b) evolvable

. By naturally we mean that the system is not fault-tolerant by explicit design nor due to evolutionary pressure, but rather that the framework insures a high probability of fault-tolerance as an emergent property. In this paper, we propose to study the self-repair capacities of a specific developmental cellular system introduced in [13]. More specifically we compare the toroidal and the non-toroidal cases. Their evolvability is to be presented in details in a further article. All the examples studied here have been evolved to configure an abstract digital circuit. The evolved organisms are subjected to a series of different fault models and their self-repair abilities are reported. From the results exposed here, it can be concluded that, while not systematic, perfect self-repair, and hence fault-tolerance is a highly probable property of these organisms and that many of them even exhibit fully perfect self-repair behaviour under all tests performed.