Robert Cardona

Renzo Bruera, Robert Cardona, Eva Miranda et al.

We explore the relationship between Turing completeness and topological entropy of dynamical systems. We first prove that a natural class of Turing machines that we call "branching Turing machines" (which includes most of the known examples of universal Turing machines) has positive topological entropy. Motivated by the recent construction of Turing complete Euler flows, we deduce that any Turing complete dynamics with a continuous encoding that simulates a universal branching machine is chaotic. On the other hand, we show that, unexpectedly, universal Turing machines with zero topological entropy (and even zero speed) can be constructed, unveiling the independence of chaos and universality at the symbolic level.

William Bernardoni, Robert Cardona, Jacob Cleveland et al.

In this paper we introduce some new algebraic and geometric perspectives on networked space communications. Our main contribution is a novel definition of a time-varying graph (TVG), defined in terms of a matrix with values in subsets of the real line P(R). We leverage semi-ring properties of P(R) to model multi-hop communication in a TVG using matrix multiplication and a truncated Kleene star. This leads to novel statistics on the communication capacity of TVGs called lifetime curves, which we generate for large samples of randomly chosen STARLINK satellites, whose connectivity is modeled over day-long simulations. Determining when a large subsample of STARLINK is temporally strongly connected is further analyzed using novel metrics introduced here that are inspired by topological data analysis (TDA). To better model networking scenarios between the Earth and Mars, we introduce various semi-rings capable of modeling propagation delay as well as protocols common to Delay Tolerant Networking (DTN), such as store-and-forward. Finally, we illustrate the applicability of zigzag persistence for featurizing different space networks and demonstrate the efficacy of K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN) classification for distinguishing Earth-Mars and Earth-Moon satellite systems using time-varying topology alone.

Robert Cardona, Justin Curry, Tung Lam et al.

Adapting a definition given by Bjerkevik and Lesnick for multiparameter persistence modules, we introduce an $\ell^p$-type extension of the interleaving distance on merge trees. We show that our distance is a metric, and that it upper-bounds the $p$-Wasserstein distance between the associated barcodes. For each $p\in[1,\infty]$, we prove that this distance is stable with respect to cellular sublevel filtrations and that it is the universal (i.e., largest) distance satisfying this stability property. In the $p=\infty$ case, this gives a novel proof of universality for the interleaving distance on merge trees.