  Robustness to a wide variety of negative factors and the ability to
self-repair is an inherent and natural characteristic of all life forms on
earth. As opposed to nature, man-made systems are in most cases not inherently
robust and a significant effort has to be made in order to make them resistant
against failures. This can be done in a wide variety of ways and on various
system levels. In the field of digital systems, for example, techniques such as
triple modular redundancy (TMR) are frequently used, which results in a
considerable hardware overhead. Biologically-inspired computing by means of
bio-chemical metaphors offers alternative paradigms, which need to be explored
and evaluated.
  Here, we are interested to evaluate the potential of nature-inspired
artificial chemistries and membrane systems as an alternative information
representing and processing paradigm in order to obtain robust and spatially
extended Boolean computing systems in a distributed environment. We investigate
conceptual approaches inspired by artificial chemistries and membrane systems
and compare proof-of-concepts. First, we show, that elementary logical
functions can be implemented. Second, we illustrate how they can be made more
robust and how they can be assembled to larger-scale systems. Finally, we
discuss the implications for and paths to possible genuine implementations.
Compared to the main body of work in artificial chemistries, we take a very
pragmatic and implementation-oriented approach and are interested in realizing
Boolean computations only. The results emphasize that artificial chemistries
can be used to implement Boolean logic in a spatially extended and distributed
environment and can also be made highly robust, but at a significant price.
