Abstract

A group is usually input into a computer by specifying the group either using a presentation or using a generating set of permutations or matrices. Here we will emphasize the latter approach, referring to [Si3, Si4, Ser1] for details of the other situations. Thus, the basic computational setting discussed here is as follows: a group is given, specified as G = X in terms of some generating set X of its elements, where X is an arbitrary subset of either Sn or GL(d, q ) (a familiar example is the group of Rubik’s cube). The goal is then to find properties of G efficiently, such as |G|, the derived series, a composition series, Sylow subgroups, and so on.

Citations