It reminds me of the way that aircraft avionics are sometimes made more reliable - they build N complete controllers from scratch, to the same requirements, the

It reminds me of the way that aircraft avionics are sometimes made more reliable - they build N complete controllers from scratch, to the same requirements, then use a voting system to discard the output from a controller that is malfunctioning (and therefore producing different output from the N-1 others). It seems to me though that there is a big difference in the problem domains. Biological systems can produce a range of outputs that are on a sliding scale of more or less desirable - but software systems are generally specified to produce a single correct output, and any deviation from that is regarded as a complete failure.