Evolving messy gates for fault tolerance: some preliminary findings

We investigate a preliminary model of gate-like components with added random noise. We refer to these types of components as messy. The principal idea behind messy gates is that evolving circuits using messy gates may confer some beneficial properties, one being fault-tolerance. The exploitation of the physical characteristics has already been demonstrated in intrinsic evolution of electronic circuits. This provided some of the inspiration for the work reported in this paper. Here we are trying to create a simulateable world in which "physical characteristics" can be exploited. We are also trying to study the question: What kind of components are most useful in an evolutionary design scenario?.