The Fault-Tolerant Early Bird Problem

The capabilities of reliable computations in one-dimensional cellular automata are investigated by means of the Early Bird Problem. The problem is typical for situations in massively parallel systems where a global behavior must be achieved by only local interactions between the single elements. The cells that cause the misoperations are assumed to behave as follows. They run a self-diagnosis before the actual computation once. The result is stored locally such that the working state of a cell becomes visible to its neighbors. A non-working (defective) cell cannot modify information but is able to transmit it unchanged with unit speed. We present an O(n log(n) log(n))-time fault-tolerant solution of the Early Bird Problem. key words: cellular automata, fault tolerance, early bird problem, parallel algorithms