On the Termination Problem for Counter Machines with Incrementing Errors

Christopher Hampson

Abstract: In contrast to their reliable and lossy-error counterparts whose termination problems are either undecidable or non-primitive recursive, the termination problem for counter machines with incrementing errors is shown to be PSpace-hard but remains solvable in ExpSpace. This is a notable decrease in complexity over that of insertion-error channel systems (with emptiness testing) whose termination problem is known to be non-elementary. Furthermore, by fixing the number of available counters, we obtain a tight NLogSpace-complete bound for the termination problem.