The sprinkling problem (Q1209406)

The authors define a sprinkling to be a matrix-valued linear function \(W(x)\) of a vector variable \(x\) with the property that every nonzero entry of \(W(x)\) is an entry of \(x\). The sprinkling problem is to characterize those sprinklings \(W\) for which \(N(W(x)) \leq n(x)\) for all \(x\), where \(N\) denotes the spectral norm for matrices and \(n\) the Euclidean norm for vectors. The authors mention several equivalent formulations of this problem and describe some sufficient conditions on \(W\) for the above inequality and some necessary conditions in terms of forbidden subpatterns of \(W\). A complete solution remains open.