Artificial Life explores the characteristics of living organsims to understand not only life as it is, but also as it could be. Embryonics is a proposal for a new generation of fault-tolerant Field-Programmable Multicellular Arrays inspired by nature and appropriate for Artificial Life research. Embryonic arrays use hardeware redundancy and array reconfiguration mechanisms to achieve fault tolerance. In this paper the k-out-of-m reliability model is used to analyse the reconfiguration strategies used in embryonic arrays. Two schemes are investigated: row-or column-elimination and cellelimination. The models proposed can also be used to analyse the reliability of systems with spares other than embryonic arrays.
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