The Firing Squad Synchronization problems for number patterns on a seven-segment display and segment arrays

The Firing Squad Synchronization Problem (FSSP), one of the most well-known problems related to cellular automata, was originally proposed by Myhill in 1957 and became famous through the work of Moore [1]. The first solution to this problem was given by Minsky and McCarthy [2] and a minimal time solution was given by Goto [3]. A significant amount of research has also dealt with variants of this problem. In this paper, from a theoretical interest, we will extend this problem to number patterns on a seven-segment display. Some of these problems can be generalized as the FSSP for some special trees called segment trees. The FSSP for segment trees can be reduced to a FSSP for a one-dimensional array divided evenly by joint cells that we call segment array. We will give algorithms to solve the FSSPs for this segment array and other number patterns, respectively. Moreover, we will clarify the minimal time to solve these problems and show that there exists no such solution. Copyright