Computer know thy self!: a biological way to look at fault-tolerance

The body's immune system is impressively good at coping with external and internal errors, usually known as bacteria and viruses. The body is able to distinguish the haemoglobin found in blood from the insulin secreted by the pancreas from the vitreous humor contained in the eye from everything else. It must manage to repel innumerable different kinds of invading organisms and yet not attack the body. The question to be answered is can we mimic these mechanisms in the design of our computer systems? This paper gives some details on how the body actually performs this amazing feat and gives some suggestions as to how this might inspire our design of computer systems increasing their reliability-immunotronics.