The generation of discrete structures up to isomorphism is interesting as well for theoretical as for practical purposes. Mathematicians want to look at and analyse structures and for example chemical industry uses mathematical generators of isomers for structure elucidation. The example chosen in this paper for explaining general generation methods is a relatively far reaching and fast graph generator which should serve as a basis for the next more powerful version of MOLGEN, our generator of chemical isomers. 1

. Isomorphism problems often can be solved by determining orbits of a group acting on the set of all objects to be classified. The paper centers around algorithms for this topic and shows how to base them on the same idea, the homomorphism principle. Especially it is shown that forming Sims chains, using an algorithmic version of Burnside's table of marks, computing double coset representatives, and computing Sylow subgroups of automorphism groups can be explained in this way. The exposition is based on graph theoretic concepts to give an easy explanation of data structures for group actions. 1. A General Point of View A natural goal in mathematical theories is a full description of the objects that are investigated. This goal has been successfully achieved in some cases, for example all finite abelian groups and with much more effort all finite simple groups. More often one restricted the research activity firstly to more modest problems like the pure existence of any object with som...