Classical spin Hamiltonians are context-sensitive languages

Autor: Stengele, Sebastian, Drexel, David, Cuevas, Gemma De las
Rok vydání: 2020
Předmět:
Zdroj: Proc. R. Soc. A 479: 20220553 (2023)
Druh dokumentu: Working Paper
DOI: 10.1098/rspa.2022.0553
Popis: Classical spin Hamiltonians are a powerful tool to model complex systems, characterised by a local structure given by the local Hamiltonians. One of the best understood local structures is the grammar of formal languages, which are central in computer science and linguistics, and have a natural complexity measure given by the Chomsky hierarchy. If we see classical spin Hamiltonians as languages, what grammar do the local Hamiltonians correspond to? Here we cast classical spin Hamiltonians as formal languages, and classify them in the Chomsky hierarchy. We prove that the language of (effectively) zero-dimensional spin Hamiltonians is regular, one-dimensional spin Hamiltonians is deterministic context-free, and higher-dimensional and all-to-all spin Hamiltonians is context-sensitive. This provides a new complexity measure for classical spin Hamiltonians, which captures the hardness of recognising spin configurations and their energies. We compare it to the computational complexity of the ground state energy problem, and find a different easy-to-hard threshold for the Ising model. We also investigate the dependence on the language of the spin Hamiltonian. Finally, we define the language of the time evolution of a spin Hamiltonian and classify it in the Chomsky hierarchy. Our work suggests that universal spin models are weaker than universal Turing machines.
Comment: v6: Very close to published version. v5: fixed two missing references. v4: Completely rewritten, with unified and new results and a new title. v3: More results; 24 pages, 9 figures, 9 tables. v2: More results and extensively rewritten; 18 pages and 7 figures; code of linear bounded automaton also attached. v1: 13 pages, 7 figures, code of deterministic pushdown automaton attached
Databáze: arXiv