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arXiv · 2610.23523

Complexity of liveness in ring Petri nets and of halting in chip-firing on simple digraphs

Eike Best·Raymond Devillers·Petr Jančar·Matěj Ošťádal
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Abstract

A ring Petri net (weighted circuit, cyclic weighted T-system) consists of a single directed circuit with arbitrary positive arc weights. We show that deciding liveness of ring Petri nets is coNP-complete, and that coNP-hardness holds in the strong sense already for token-conserving rings, in which every transition consumes and produces the same number of tokens. The proof is a short reduction from the covering problem for systems of residue classes (the complement of Simultaneous Incongruences). Together with a known reduction to circuits, it follows that liveness of weighted T-systems (weighted marked graphs, synchronous dataflow graphs) is coNP-complete, and coNP-hard in the strong sense. As a further consequence, the halting problem for chip-firing on simple directed graphs is NP-complete, which answers a question of Farrell and Levine. On 7 October 2026, the problem of liveness was posed to the AI model Claude Opus 5.5 (Anthropic), which found the reduction, also suggesting the application to the chip-firing problem, and wrote a first version of this paper; the human authors checked it and, together with the model, revised it iteratively into the present form.

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Eike Best, Raymond Devillers, Petr Jančar, Matěj Ošťádal. 2026-10-16. Complexity of liveness in ring Petri nets and of halting in chip-firing on simple digraphs. https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.23523

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