Pablo Santos | Searcharxiv

arXiv2026

Reachability with Restricted Reactions in Inhibitory Chemical Reaction Networks

Chemical Reaction Networks (CRNs) are a well-established model of distributed computing characterized by quantities of molecular species that can transform or change through applications of reactions. A fundamental problem in CRNs is the reachability problem, which asks if an initial configuration of species can transition to a target configuration through an applicable sequence of reactions. It is well-known that the reachability problem in general CRNs was recently proven to be Ackermann-complete. However, if the CRN's reactions are restricted in both power, such as only deleting species (deletion-only rules) or consuming and producing an equal number of species (volume-preserving rules), and size (unimolecular or bimolecular rules), then reachability falls below Ackermann-completeness, and is even solvable in polynomial time for deletion-only systems. In this paper, we investigate reachability under this set of restricted unimolecular and bimolecular reactions, but in the Priority-Inhibitory CRN and Inhibitory CRN models. These models extend a traditional CRN by allowing some reactions to be inhibited from firing in a configuration if certain species are present; the exact inhibition behavior varies between the models. We first show that reachability with Priority iCRNs mostly remains in P for deletion-only systems, but becomes NP-complete for one case. We then show that reachability with deletion-only reactions for iCRNs is mostly NP-complete, and PSPACE-complete even for (1,1)-size (general) reactions. We also provide FPT algorithms for solving most of the reachability problems for the iCRN model. Finally, we show reachability for CRNs with states is already NP-hard for the simplest deletion-only systems, and is PSPACE-complete even for (general) (1,1)-size reactions.

cs.CC↗

arXiv2025

Polynomial Equivalence of Extended Chemical Reaction Models

The ability to detect whether a species (or dimension) is zero in Chemical Reaction Networks (CRN), Vector Addition Systems, or Petri Nets is known to increase the power of these models -- making them capable of universal computation. While this ability may appear in many forms, such as extending the models to allow transitions to be inhibited, prioritized, or synchronized, we present an extension that directly performs this zero checking. We introduce a new void genesis CRN variant with a simple design that merely increments the count of a specific species when any other species' count goes to zero. As with previous extensions, we show that the model is Turing Universal. We then analyze several other studied CRN variants and show that they are all equivalent through a polynomial simulation with the void genesis model, which does not merely follow from Turing-universality. Thus, inhibitor species, reactions that occur at different rates, being allowed to run reactions in parallel, or even being allowed to continually add more volume to the CRN, does not add additional simulation power beyond simply detecting if a species count becomes zero.

q-bio.MN↗