The time of graph bootstrap percolation

Graph-bootstrap percolation, also known as weak saturation, was introduced by Bollob\'as in 1968. In this process, we start with initial "infected" set of edges $E_0$, and we infect new edges according to a predetermined rule. Given a graph $H$ and a set of previously infected edges $E_t\subseteq E(K_n)$, we infect a non-infected edge $e$ if it completes a new copy of $H$ in $G=([n],E_t\cup e)$. A question raised by Bollob\'as asks for the maximum time the process can run bef...

In r-neighbour bootstrap percolation on the vertex set of a graph G, vertices are initially infected independently with some probability p. At each time step, the infected set expands by infecting all uninfected vertices that have at least r infected neighbours. We study the distribution of the time t at which all vertices become infected. Given t = t(n) = o(log n/log log n), we prove a sharp threshold result for the probability that percolation occurs by time t in d-neighbou...

Given a fixed graph $H$ and an $n$-vertex graph $G$, the $H$-bootstrap percolation process on $G$ is defined to be the sequence of graphs $G_i$, $i\geq 0$ which starts with $G_0:=G$ and in which $G_{i+1}$ is obtained from $G_i$ by adding every edge that completes a copy of $H$. We are interested in the maximum number of steps, over all $n$-vertex graphs $G$, that this process takes to stabilise. In the first of a series of papers exploring the behaviour of this function, deno...

We investigate the behaviour of $r$-neighbourhood bootstrap percolation on the binomial $k$-uniform random hypergraph $H_k(n,p)$ for given integers $k\geq 2$ and $r\geq 2$. In $r$-neighbourhood bootstrap percolation, infection spreads through the hypergraph, starting from a set of initially infected vertices, and in each subsequent step of the process every vertex with at least $r$ infected neighbours becomes infected. For our analysis the set of initially infected vertices i...

By bootstrap percolation we mean the following deterministic process on a graph $G$. Given a set $A$ of vertices "infected" at time 0, new vertices are subsequently infected, at each time step, if they have at least $r\in\mathbb{N}$ previously infected neighbors. When the set $A$ is chosen at random, the main aim is to determine the critical probability $p_c(G,r)$ at which percolation (infection of the entire graph) becomes likely to occur. This bootstrap process has been ext...

For fixed $r\geq 2$, we consider bootstrap percolation with threshold $r$ on the Erd\H{o}s-R\'enyi graph ${\cal G}_{n,p}$. We identify a threshold for $p$ above which there is with high probability a set of size $r$ which can infect the entire graph. This improves a result of Feige, Krivelevich and Reichman, which gives bounds for this threshold, up to multiplicative constants. As an application of our results, we also obtain an upper bound for the threshold for $K_4$-boots...

We show that for every $r\ge 3$, the maximal running time of the $K^{r}_{r+1}$-bootstrap percolation in the complete $r$-uniform hypergraph on $n$ vertices $K_n^r$ is $\Theta(n^r)$. This answers a recent question of Noel and Ranganathan in the affirmative, and disproves a conjecture of theirs. Moreover, we show that the prefactor is of the form $r^{-r} \mathrm{e}^{O(r)}$ as $r\to\infty$.

We study the percolation time of the $r$-neighbour bootstrap percolation model on the discrete torus $(\Z/n\Z)^d$. For $t$ at most a polylog function of $n$ and initial infection probabilities within certain ranges depending on $t$, we prove that the percolation time of a random subset of the torus is exactly equal to $t$ with high probability as $n$ tends to infinity. Our proof rests crucially on three new extremal theorems that together establish an almost complete understa...

Bootstrap percolation is a cellular automaton modelling the spread of an `infection' on a graph. In this note, we prove a family of lower bounds on the critical probability for $r$-neighbour bootstrap percolation on Galton--Watson trees in terms of moments of the offspring distributions. With this result we confirm a conjecture of Bollob\'as, Gunderson, Holmgren, Janson and Przykucki. We also show that these bounds are best possible up to positive constants not depending on t...

Let $G_{n,p}^1$ be a superposition of the random graph $G_{n,p}$ and a one-dimensional lattice: the $n$ vertices are set to be on a ring with fixed edges between the consecutive vertices, and with random independent edges given with probability $p$ between any pair of vertices. Bootstrap percolation on a random graph is a process of spread of "activation" on a given realisation of the graph with a given number of initially active nodes. At each step those vertices which have ...