Two-State Max-Plus Comparison Is Decidable

Abstract

Daviaud, Guillon, and Merlet proved that comparison of max-plus automata is undecidable under a fixed state bound of 553 and explicitly left the range from 2 to 552 states open. We resolve the two-state endpoint. More strongly, given an arbitrary finite max-plus automaton $A$ and a max-plus automaton $B$ with at most two states, it is decidable whether $[\![A]\!](w)\leq [\![B]\!](w)$ for every word $w$. The structural reason is a one-dimensional projective normal form for two-state dynamics. Outside an effective bounded region, a transition has one of three tail behaviors: it propagates the unbounded projective gap with gap-independent height increment, forgets the gap with gap-independent height increment, or reads the gap magnitude into the height increment and then forgets it. In particular, any transition whose output depends on the unbounded gap necessarily destroys that gap. This yields an exact one-counter realization of $B$. Effective semilinearity of context-free Parikh images then reduces comparison to Presburger arithmetic. As a consequence, two-state max-plus comparison, equivalence, and positivity are decidable.