The Bunk Bed Conjecture and the Skolem Problem

UNCG Author/Contributor (non-UNCG co-authors, if there are any, appear on document)
James Rudzinski (Creator)
Institution
The University of North Carolina at Greensboro (UNCG )
Web Site: http://library.uncg.edu/
Advisor
Clifford Smyth

Abstract: We present our results on two open problems, the Bunk Bed Conjecture and the Skolem Problem. The 35-year-old Bunk Bed Conjecture is a natural conjecture on connection events in a randomly disrupted network. We reduced this problem to a counting problem on graphs. As part of that research, we developed a new algorithm for calculating the inverse images of a monotone Boolean function. This algorithm greatly improves the space complexity of the existing Hansel’s algorithm for this problem. It is also parallelizable whereas Hansel’s algorithm is not. The 85-year-old Skolem Problem is to prove or disprove the existence of a decision procedure to determine whether a rational linear recurrence ever has a zero. We give a partial decision procedure for the more general problem of deciding whether a rational linear recurrence is non-negative. We give wide-ranging conditions under which our procedure is guaranteed to terminate.

Additional Information

Publication
Dissertation
Language: English
Date: 2021
Keywords
Bunk Bed Conjecture, Positivity Problem, Skolem Problem, Symmetric Chain Decomposition
Subjects
Discrete mathematics
Prediction (Logic)

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