Feynman's Unsolved Puzzle?

"In The Feynman Lectures on Computation, Richard Feynman poses an interesting little puzzle involving the synchronization of finite state machines acting as generals and soldiers. While he was able to find an answer to the problem, the minimum time solution apparently eluded him, and he ended his description of the puzzle with the following Fermat-like declaration: 'Somebody has actually found a solution with this minimum time. That is very difficult though, and you should not be so ambitious.

"Here is the full description of the problem, in Feynman's own words. Please remember that these are finite state machines, so you can't use any methods that involve counting the number of soldiers or assigning a number to each soldier.

Problem 3.4: Before turning to Turing machines, I will introduce you to a nice FSM problem that you might like to think about. It is called the 'Firing Squad' problem. We have an arbitrarily long line of identical finite state machines that I call 'soldiers'. Let us say there are N of them. At one end of the line is a 'general', another FSM. Here is what happens. The general shouts 'Fire'. The puzzle is to get all of the soldiers to fire simultaneously, in the shortest possible time, subject to the following constraints: firstly, time goes in units; secondly, the state of each FSM at time T+1 can only depend on the state of its next-door neighbors at time T; thirdly, the method you come up with must be independent of N, the number of soldiers. At the beginning, each FSM is quiescent. Then the general spits out a pulse, 'fire', and this acts as an input for the soldier immediately next to him. This soldier reacts as in some way, enters a new state, and this in turn affects the soldier next to him and so on down the line. All the soldiers interact in some way, yack yack yack, and at some point they become synchronized and spit out a pulse representing their 'firing'. (The general, incidentally, does nothing on his own initiative after starting things off.)

--
Create your RupeeMail Account & refer your friends to earn launch referral bonus on every new registration.
Try this... http://www.rupeemail.in/rupeemail/invite.do?in=MTUyNjUlIyVSajZ5dlBocDhrU3ozWVZ3bTBhZWQyQ2ZF