Revisiting the Complexity of Stability of Continuous and Hybrid Systems

We develop a framework to give upper bounds on the "practical" computational complexity of stability problems for a wide range of nonlinear continuous and hybrid systems. To do so, we describe stability properties of dynamical systems using first-order formulas over the real numbers, and reduce stability problems to the delta-decision problems of these formulas. The framework allows us to obtain a precise characterization of the complexity of different notions of stability for nonlinear continuous and hybrid systems. We prove that bounded versions of the stability problems are generally decidable, and give upper bounds on their complexity. The unbounded versions are generally undecidable, for which we give upper bounds on their degrees of unsolvability

Polynomial Time corresponds to Solutions of Polynomial Ordinary Differential Equations of Polynomial Length

We provide an implicit characterization of polynomial time computation in terms of ordinary differential equations: we characterize the class $\operatorname{PTIME}$ of languages computable in polynomial time in terms of differential equations with polynomial right-hand side. This result gives a purely continuous (time and space) elegant and simple characterization of $\operatorname{PTIME}$. This is the first time such classes are characterized using only ordinary differential equations. Our characterization extends to functions computable in polynomial time over the reals in the sense of computable analysis. This extends to deterministic complexity classes above polynomial time. This may provide a new perspective on classical complexity, by giving a way to define complexity classes, like $\operatorname{PTIME}$, in a very simple way, without any reference to a notion of (discrete) machine. This may also provide ways to state classical questions about computational complexity via ordinary differential equations, i.e.~by using the framework of analysis

Kolmogorov's Structure Functions and Model Selection

In 1974 Kolmogorov proposed a non-probabilistic approach to statistics and model selection. Let data be finite binary strings and models be finite sets of binary strings. Consider model classes consisting of models of given maximal (Kolmogorov) complexity. The ``structure function'' of the given data expresses the relation between the complexity level constraint on a model class and the least log-cardinality of a model in the class containing the data. We show that the structure function determines all stochastic properties of the data: for every constrained model class it determines the individual best-fitting model in the class irrespective of whether the ``true'' model is in the model class considered or not. In this setting, this happens {\em with certainty}, rather than with high probability as is in the classical case. We precisely quantify the goodness-of-fit of an individual model with respect to individual data. We show that--within the obvious constraints--every graph is realized by the structure function of some data. We determine the (un)computability properties of the various functions contemplated and of the ``algorithmic minimal sufficient statistic.''Comment: 25 pages LaTeX, 5 figures. In part in Proc 47th IEEE FOCS; this final version (more explanations, cosmetic modifications) to appear in IEEE Trans Inform T

Bounded time computation on metric spaces and Banach spaces

We extend the framework by Kawamura and Cook for investigating computational complexity for operators occurring in analysis. This model is based on second-order complexity theory for functions on the Baire space, which is lifted to metric spaces by means of representations. Time is measured in terms of the length of the input encodings and the required output precision. We propose the notions of a complete representation and of a regular representation. We show that complete representations ensure that any computable function has a time bound. Regular representations generalize Kawamura and Cook's more restrictive notion of a second-order representation, while still guaranteeing fast computability of the length of the encodings. Applying these notions, we investigate the relationship between purely metric properties of a metric space and the existence of a representation such that the metric is computable within bounded time. We show that a bound on the running time of the metric can be straightforwardly translated into size bounds of compact subsets of the metric space. Conversely, for compact spaces and for Banach spaces we construct a family of admissible, complete, regular representations that allow for fast computation of the metric and provide short encodings. Here it is necessary to trade the time bound off against the length of encodings

A Survey on Continuous Time Computations

We provide an overview of theories of continuous time computation. These theories allow us to understand both the hardness of questions related to continuous time dynamical systems and the computational power of continuous time analog models. We survey the existing models, summarizing results, and point to relevant references in the literature

On zeros of Martin-L\"of random Brownian motion

We investigate the sample path properties of Martin-L\"of random Brownian motion. We show (1) that many classical results which are known to hold almost surely hold for every Martin-L\"of random Brownian path, (2) that the effective dimension of zeroes of a Martin-L\"of random Brownian path must be at least 1/2, and conversely that every real with effective dimension greater than 1/2 must be a zero of some Martin-L\"of random Brownian path, and (3) we will demonstrate a new proof that the solution to the Dirichlet problem in the plane is computable