Fault-tolerant structures: Towards robust self-replication in a probabilistic environment

Abstract

Self-replicating structures in cellular automata have been extensively studied in the past as models of Artificial Life. However, CAs, unlike the biological cellular model, are very brittle: any faulty cell usually leads to the complete destruction of any emerging structures. In this paper, we propose a method, inspired by error-correcting-code theory, to develop fault-resistant rules at, almost, no extra cost. We then propose fault-tolerant substructures necessary to future fault-tolerant self-replicating structures.