MUXTREE Revisited: Embryonics as a Reconfiguration Strategy in Fault-Tolerant Processor Arrays

Embryonics’ proposal is to construct arrays of processing elements with self-diagnosis and self-reconfiguration abilities able to tolerate the presence of failing cells in the same fashion as natural cellular systems do. Self-healing mechanisms found in nature and the implicit redundancy of cellular architectures constitute the foundations of embryonic systems’ fault tolerance properties. It will be shown in this paper how by incorporating the biological concepts of chromosome and gene, the complexity of the MUXTREE embryonic architecture can be simplified, in comparison with the previous version. It is argued that by assuming a broader meaning for the concept of evolution it possible to classify embryonic arrays and other adaptable systems as evolvable.