English

The Continuous Skolem-Pisot Problem: On the Complexity of Reachability for Linear Ordinary Differential Equations

Dynamical Systems 2009-04-23 v2

Abstract

We study decidability and complexity questions related to a continuous analogue of the Skolem-Pisot problem concerning the zeros and nonnegativity of a linear recurrent sequence. In particular, we show that the continuous version of the nonnegativity problem is NP-hard in general and we show that the presence of a zero is decidable for several subcases, including instances of depth two or less, although the decidability in general is left open. The problems may also be stated as reachability problems related to real zeros of exponential polynomials or solutions to initial value problems of linear differential equations, which are interesting problems in their own right.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.0809.2189,
  title  = {The Continuous Skolem-Pisot Problem: On the Complexity of Reachability for Linear Ordinary Differential Equations},
  author = {Paul Bell and Jean-Charles Delvenne and Raphael Jungers and Vincent D. Blondel},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0809.2189},
  year   = {2009}
}

Comments

14 pages, no figure

R2 v1 2026-06-21T11:19:40.793Z