The firing squad synchronization problem is considered for defective cellular automata. A lower bound of time tf for the problem is derived. The state complexity to solve the problem is investigated and it is shown that the state set has to be arbitrary large to obtain solutions of time complexity (n). For memory-augmented defective cellular automata a tf-time solution is given.

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.