Cooperative Boolean systems with generically long attractors I

Abstract

We study the class of cooperative Boolean networks whose only regulatory functions are COPY, binary AND and binary OR. We prove that for all sufficiently large N and c < 2 there exist Boolean networks in this class that have an attractor of length >c N whose basin of attraction comprises an arbitrarily large fraction of the state space. The existence of such networks sharply contrasts with results on continuous dynamical systems that imply non-genericity of non-steady-state attractors under the assumption of cooperativity.