English

Embedding arbitrary Boolean circuits into fungal automata with arbitrary update sequences

Computational Complexity 2026-03-05 v3 Formal Languages and Automata Theory

Abstract

The sandpile automata of Bak, Tang, and Wiesenfeld (Phys. Rev. Lett., 1987) are a simple model for the diffusion of particles in space. A fundamental problem related to the complexity of the model is predicting its evolution in the parallel setting. Despite decades of effort, a classification of this problem for two-dimensional sandpile automata remains outstanding. Fungal automata were recently proposed by Goles et al. (Phys. Lett. A, 2020) as a spin-off of the model in which diffusion occurs either in horizontal (H)(H) or vertical (V)(V) directions according to a so-called update scheme. Goles et al. proved that the prediction problem for this model with the update scheme H4V4H^4V^4 is P\textbf{P}-complete. This result was subsequently improved by Modanese and Worsch (Algorithmica, 2024), who showed the problem is P\textbf{P}-complete also for the simpler updatenscheme HVHV. In this work, we fill in the gaps and prove that the prediction problem is P\textbf{P}-complete for any update scheme that contains both HH and VV at least once.

Cite

@article{arxiv.2602.19477,
  title  = {Embedding arbitrary Boolean circuits into fungal automata with arbitrary update sequences},
  author = {Eric Goles and Augusto Modanese and Martín Ríos-Wilson and Domingo Ruiz-Tala and Thomas Worsch},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2602.19477},
  year   = {2026}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T10:46:49.582Z