On the Periodic Decompositions of Multidimensional Configurations




Herva, Pyry; Kari, Jarkko

Královič, Rastislav; Kůrková, Věra

International Conference on Current Trends in Theory and Practice of Computer Science

PublisherSpringer Nature Switzerland

2025

Lecture Notes in Computer Science

SOFSEM 2025: Theory and Practice of Computer Science: 50th International Conference on Current Trends in Theory and Practice of Computer Science, SOFSEM 2025, Bratislava, Slovak Republic, January 20–23, 2025, Proceedings, Part II

Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)

15539

45

57

978-3-031-82696-2

978-3-031-82697-9

0302-9743

1611-3349

DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-82697-9_4

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-82697-9_4



We consider d-dimensional configurations, that is, colorings of the d-dimensional integer grid Zd with finitely many colors. Moreover, we interpret the colors as integers so that configurations are functions Zd→Z of finite range. We say that such function is k-periodic if it is invariant under translations in k linearly independent directions. It is known that if a configuration has a non-trivial annihilator, that is, if some non-trivial linear combination of its translations is the zero function, then it is a sum of finitely many periodic functions. This result is known as the periodic decomposition theorem. We prove two different improvements of it. The first improvement gives a characterization on annihilators of a configuration to guarantee the k-periodicity of the functions in its periodic decomposition—for any k. The periodic decomposition theorem is then a special case of this result with k=1. The second improvement concerns so called sparse configurations for which the number of non-zero values in patterns grows at most linearly with respect to the diameter of the pattern. We prove that a sparse configuration with a non-trivial annihilator is a sum of finitely many periodic fibers where a fiber means a function whose non-zero values lie on a unique line.



This research was supported by the Academy of Finland grant 354965.


Last updated on 2025-02-05 at 11:22