| Abstract: | Today’s software is brittle. A tiny corruption in an executable will normally result in terminal failure of that program. But nature does not seem to suffer from the same problems. A multicellular organism, its genes evolved and developed, shows graceful degradation: should it be damaged, it is designed to continue to work. This paper describes an investigation into software with the same properties. Three programs, one human-designed, one evolved using genetic programming, and one evolved and developed using a fractal developmental system are compared. All three calculate the square root of a number. The programs are damaged by corrupting their compiled executable code, and the ability for each of them to survive such damage is assessed. Experiments demonstrate that only the evolutionary developmental code shows graceful degradation after damage. |
