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arXiv · 2608.02606

Self-Organising Digital Circuits

Marcello Barylli·Gabriel Béna·Alexander Mordvintsev·Eleni Nisioti·Sebastian Risi
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Abstract

Fault tolerance in classical computing has traditionally relied on static strategies like hardware redundancy and error-correcting codes. Biological systems, in contrast, exhibit adaptive plasticity, maintaining function through dynamic re-organisation around damage. Inspired by this principle, we introduce Self-Organising Digital Circuits, framing functional logic generation and maintenance as a meta-learning problem on graphs. Our architecture employs a topology-masked Transformer that configures the Lookup Tables (LUT) of a circuit's Boolean gates. Extending the pattern-generation paradigm of Neural Cellular Automata (NCA), it navigates the degenerate Boolean search space to satisfy a computational task, rather than regenerating a fixed target state. We demonstrate that it can self-assemble functional circuits from scratch and rapidly re-route logic around permanent, previously unseen hardware faults. For soft errors, the policy achieves near-perfect recovery (>99.99\% accuracy) from damage sizes far exceeding training conditions. We further observe generalisation across circuit scales: accuracy improves on graphs substantially wider than those seen during training. This work bridges the principles of biological self-organisation with the practical domain of digital hardware.

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Marcello Barylli, Gabriel Béna, Alexander Mordvintsev, Eleni Nisioti, Sebastian Risi. 2026-08-14. Self-Organising Digital Circuits. https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.02606

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