Our main result is a succinct counterpoint to Courcelle's meta-theorem as follows: every cw-nontrivial monadic second-order (MSO) property is either NP-hard or coNP-hard over graphs given by succinct representations. Succint representations are Boolean circuits computing the adjacency relation. Cw-nontrivial properties are those which have infinitely many models and infinitely many countermodels with bounded cliquewidth. Moreover, we explore what happens when the cw-nontriviality condition is dropped and show that, under a reasonable complexity assumption, the previous dichotomy fails, even for questions expressible in first-order logic.

We prove general complexity lower bounds on automata networks, in the style of Rice’s theorem, but in the computable world. Our main result is that testing any fixed first-order property on the dynamics of an automata network is either trivial, or NP-hard, or coNP-hard. Moreover, there exist such properties that are arbitrarily high in the polynomial-time hierarchy. We also prove that testing a first-order property given as input on an automata network (also part of the input) is PSPACE-hard. Besides, we show that, under a natural effectiveness condition, any nontrivial property of the limit set of a nondeterministic network is PSPACE-hard. We also show that it is PSPACE-hard to separate deterministic networks with a very high and a very low number of limit configurations; however, the problem of deciding whether the number of limit configurations is maximal up to a polynomial quantity belongs to the polynomial-time hierarchy.

A word is quasiperiodic (or coverable) if it can be covered with occurrences of another finite word, called its quasiperiod. A word is multi-scale quasiperiodic (or multi-scale coverable) if it has infinitely many different quasiperiods. These notions were previously studied in the domains of text algorithms and combinatorics of right infinite words. We extend them to infinite pictures (two-dimensional words). Then we compare the regularity properties (uniform recurrence, uniform frequencies, topological entropy) of quasiperiodicity with multi-scale quasiperiodicity, and we also compare each of them with its one-dimensional counterpart. We also study which properties of quasiperiods enforce properties on the quasiperiodic words.

A word is quasiperiodic if it can be obtained by concatenations and overlaps of a smaller word, called a quasiperiod. Based on links between quasiperiods, right special factors and square factors, we introduce a method to determine the set of quasiperiods of a given right infinite word. Then we study the structure of the sets of quasiperiods of right infinite words and, using our method, we provide examples of right infinite words with extremal sets of quasiperiods (no quasiperiod is quasiperiodic, all quasiperiods except one are quasiperiodic, ...). Our method is also used to provide a short proof of a recent characterization of quasiperiods of the Fibonacci word. Finally we extend this result to a new characterization of standard Sturmian words using a property of their sets of quasiperiods.