Abstract
The Skolem problem is a long-standing open problem in linear dynamical systems: can a linear recurrence sequence (LRS) ever reach 0 from a given initial configuration? Similarly, the positivity problem asks whether the LRS stays positive from an initial configuration. Deciding Skolem (or positivity) has been open for half a century: The best known decidability results are for LRS with special properties (e.g., low order recurrences). On the other hand, these problems are much easier for “uninitialized” variants, where the initial configuration is not fixed but can vary arbitrarily: checking if there is an initial configuration from which the LRS stays positive can be decided by polynomial time algorithms (Tiwari in 2004, Braverman in 2006).