Fault tolerance of lateral interaction networks

An examination of the fault tolerance properties of lateral interaction networks is presented. The general concept of a soft problem is discussed along with the resulting implications for reliability. Fault injection experiments were performed using several input datasets with differing characteristics in conjunction with various combinations of network parameters. It was found that a high degree of tolerance to faults existed and that the reliability of operation degraded smoothly. This result was independent of both the nature of the input dataset and to a lesser extent of the choice of network parameters