On the complexity of freezing automata networks of bounded pathwidth

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Goles, Eric, Montealegre, Pedro, Ríos-Wilson, Martín, Theyssier, Guillaume
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Goles, Eric
Montealegre, Pedro
Ríos-Wilson, Martín
Theyssier, Guillaume
author_facet Goles, Eric
Montealegre, Pedro
Ríos-Wilson, Martín
Theyssier, Guillaume
contents An automata network is a graph of entities, each holding a state from a finite set and evolving according to a local update rule which depends only on its neighbors in the network's graph. It is freezing if there is an order on the states such that the state evolution of any node is non-decreasing in any orbit. They are commonly used to model epidemic propagation, diffusion phenomena like bootstrap percolation or cristal growth. Previous works have established that, under the hypothesis that the network graph is of bounded treewidth, many problems that can be captured by trace specifications at individual nodes admit efficient algorithms. In this paper we study the even more restricted case of a network of bounded pathwidth and show two hardness results that somehow illustrate the complexity of freezing dynamics under such a strong graph constraint. First, we show that the trace specification checking problem is NL-complete. Second, we show that deciding first order properties of the orbits augmented with a reachability predicate is NP-hard.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_09297
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle On the complexity of freezing automata networks of bounded pathwidth
Goles, Eric
Montealegre, Pedro
Ríos-Wilson, Martín
Theyssier, Guillaume
Computational Complexity
Discrete Mathematics
An automata network is a graph of entities, each holding a state from a finite set and evolving according to a local update rule which depends only on its neighbors in the network's graph. It is freezing if there is an order on the states such that the state evolution of any node is non-decreasing in any orbit. They are commonly used to model epidemic propagation, diffusion phenomena like bootstrap percolation or cristal growth. Previous works have established that, under the hypothesis that the network graph is of bounded treewidth, many problems that can be captured by trace specifications at individual nodes admit efficient algorithms. In this paper we study the even more restricted case of a network of bounded pathwidth and show two hardness results that somehow illustrate the complexity of freezing dynamics under such a strong graph constraint. First, we show that the trace specification checking problem is NL-complete. Second, we show that deciding first order properties of the orbits augmented with a reachability predicate is NP-hard.
title On the complexity of freezing automata networks of bounded pathwidth
topic Computational Complexity
Discrete Mathematics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.09297