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J
UNE
/J
ULY
1997 N
OTICES OF THE
AMS 671
An Introduction toComputationalGroup Theory
Ákos Seress
C
an one rotate
onlyone
corner piece inRubik’s cube? What are the energylevels of the buckyball molecule? Arethe graphs on Figure 1 isomorphic?What is the Galois group of the poly-nomial
x
8
+2
x
7
+28
x
6
+1728
x
+3456
? Whatare the possible symmetry groups of crystals?These are all questions which, directly or in a notso obvious way, lead to problems in computa-tional group theory.Algebraic structures are well suited for ma-chine computations. One reason for that is thatwe can describe large objects very concisely bya set of generators: for example,
50
bits areenough to define
GL
5
(2)
, a group of order
9999360
, by two 0-1 matrices of size
5
×
5
.Even more importantly, often we can find a gen-erating set which reflects the structure of thegroup so that structural and quantitative prop-erties can be read off easily.Computational group theory (CGT) is one of the oldest and most developed branches of com-putational algebra. Although most general-pur-pose symbolic algebra programs can handlegroups to a certain extent, there are two systemswhich are particularly well suited for computa-tions with groups:
GAP
and
Magma
. Also, nu-merous stand-alone programs and smaller sys-tems are available.
GAP
can be obtained by anonymous ftp fromservers on three continents; the addresses can be found on the World Wide Web page
.For the availability of
Magma
.The important subareas of CGT correspondto the most frequently used representations of groups: permutation groups, matrix groups, andgroups defined by generators and relators, aswell as to perhaps the most powerful tool for theinvestigation of groups, representation theory.Also, there are specialized and more efficient al-gorithms for special classes such as nilpotent orsolvable groups. In this survey in each subareawe attempt to indicate the basic ideas and thesize of jobs which can be handled by the currentsystems on a reasonable machine. Of course, wecannot be comprehensive here. Also, because of space restrictions, our reference list consistsonly of surveys, conference volumes, books, and journal special issues. Individual results are ref-erenced in the text only if they appear in thesevolumes; most of the others can be traced backfrom these sources. An extended version of thisarticle, with complete references, can be ob-tained from
. E.O’Brien’sdatabase of papers on group theory, including
Ákos Seress is associate professor of mathematics at TheOhio State University, Columbus, Ohio. His e-mail ad- dress is
akos@math.ohio-state.edu
.Partially supported by NSF Grant CCR-9503430 and by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.Acknowledgement: the author is indebted to G. Havas,D. Holt, W. Kantor, K. Lux, J. Neubüser, and E. O’Brienfor their helpful comments. The part of the section“Polyclyclic Groups” about quotient group methods was written by J. Neubüser.
672 N
OTICES OF THE
AMS V
OLUME
44, N
UMBER
6
a lot of references to CGT, is available via
.We start with some historical remarks. Algo-rithmic questions permeated group theory fromits inception in the last century. As examples,consider that Galois’s work was inspired by thesolvability of equations. Thirty years later, Math-ieu announced the existence of the 5-transitivegroup
M
24
, but he needed twelve years to findthe “clarity and elegance necessary to present it.”Had he access to a computer, this period couldprobably have been shortened significantly. Jor-dan, Hölder, Cole, and others could also haveused the machine in their quest to classify groupsof small order.The “official” starting date of CGT may bepinned down in 1911, when Dehn proposed thesolution of the word problem, Find an algorithmto decide whether, in a group defined by a finiteset of abstract generators and relators, a wordin the generators represents the identity. Dehn’squestion was motivated by topological consid-erations; even today it is hard to draw a sharp border between combinatorial group theory andtopology. The flourishing of CGT started in thesixties, when, for example, the basic methods forpermutation group manipulation and the com-putation of character tables were established,and term rewriting procedures were introduced.Not much later, the first large applications, suchas Sims’s existence proof for Lyons’s sporadicsimple group, arose, and the development of the first integrated system, the Aachen-SydneyGroup System, started. Since then the area has been growing rapidly, both in terms of the design,implementation, and application of algorithms,as well as in the number of mathematicians in-volved in this development. Nowadays, some of the major lines of development are the integra-tion of consequences of the classification of fi-nite simple groups and methods suggested bycomplexity theoretical considerations into prac-tical algorithms and the systematic use of ran-domization. A more detailed history is in [11].
Finitely Presented Groups
Let
G
=
E
|R
be a presentation for agroup
G
:
E
=
{
g
1
,... ,g
n
}
is a finite set of generators, and
R
=
{
r
1
=1
,... ,r
m
=1
}
isa set of defining relations. Each
r
i
is aword, using the generators in
E
and theirinverses. The basic questions are to de-cide whether
G
is finite and to determinewhether a given word represents the iden-tity of
G
.By the celebrated result of Novikov andBoone, these questions are
undecidable
:they cannot be answered by a recursive al-gorithm. Nevertheless, because of the prac-tical importance of the problem, a lot of effortis devoted to the development of methods forinvestigating finitely presented groups.One basic method is the
Todd-Coxeter coset enumeration procedure
. Given
G
=
E
|R
and
H
=
h
1
,... ,h
k
, where
H
≤
G
and each
h
j
is aword in the generators of
G
and their inverses,our goal is to compute the permutation repre-sentation of
G
on the right cosets of
H
.We set up a
coset table
: this is a matrix
M
,where the rows are labelled by positive integers,representing cosets of
H
, and the columns arelabelled by the elements of
E
:=
{
g
1
,... ,g
n
,g
−
11
,... ,g
−
1
n
}
. The entries (if defined) are positive integers,
M
(
k,g
)=
l
, if weknow that
kg
=
l
for the cosets
k,l
and for
g
∈
E
. Originally, we have a
1
×|
E
|
table withno entries, where 1 denotes the coset
H
·
1
. Asnew cosets are defined, we add rows to the cosettable.Of course, we have to detect when two words,defining different rows of the table, actually be-long to the same coset of
H
. To this end, for eachrelation
r
i
=
g
i
1
g
i
2
···
g
i
t
, we also maintain a
re- lation table
. This is a matrix
M
i
, with rows la- belled by the cosets
1
,
2
,... ,
as defined in
M
,and columns labelled by the elements of the se-quence
(
g
i
1
,g
i
2
,... ,g
i
t
)
. The entry
M
i
(
k,g
i
j
)
, if defined, is the number of the coset
kg
i
1
···
g
i
j
.Initially, we have
M
i
(
k,g
i
t
)=
k
for each row num- ber
k
, since
r
i
=1
in
G
. Whenever a new cosetis defined, we fill all entries of the relation ta- bles that we can.Finally, for each generator
h
j
=
g
j
1
···
g
j
t
of
H
, we maintain a
subgroup table
. This is a ma-trix
S
j
with only one row, corresponding to thecoset
H
·
1
, and columns labelled by the factorsof
h
j
. The rule for filling entries is the same asfor the
M
i
; originally,
S
j
(1
,g
j
t
)=1
, since
Hh
j
=
H
.When the last entry is filled in a row of a re-lation table or a subgroup table, we also get anextra piece of information,
kg
=
l
, for somecosets
k,l
and
g
∈
E
. This is called a
deduction
.If the entry
M
(
k,g
)
is not yet defined, then wefill the entries
M
(
k,g
)
,
M
(
l,g
−
1
)
, and all possi-
Figure 1.
J
UNE
/J
ULY
1997 N
OTICES OF THE
AMS 673
ble entries in the relationand subgroup tables; thisway, we may get furtherdeductions. If
M
(
k,g
)
isalready defined but
l
:=
M
(
k,g
)
=
l
, then werealize that
l,l
denotethe same coset of
H
. Thisis called a
coincidence
. Wereplace all occurrences of
l,l
by the smaller of these two numbers and fill the entries of the ta- bles that we can. This may lead to further de-ductions and coincidences. The process stopswhen all entries of the coset table, the relationtables, and subgroup tables are filled.We illustrate these ideas by enumerating
G
=
g
1
,g
2
|
g
21
=1
,g
22
=1
,
(
g
1
g
2
)
3
=1
∼
=
S
3
onthe cosets of the subgroup
H
=
g
1
g
2
g
1
g
2
of order
3
. Since both generators are involutions,we have
E
=
E
. Also, we maintain only one rela-tion table, corresponding to
(
g
1
g
2
)
3
=1
; theother two relators tell us that at the definitionof new cosets, we should multiply previouscosets by
g
1
,g
2
alternatingly. Figure 2 shows thecoset table CT, relation table RT, and subgrouptable ST after the definition of the cosets
1:=
H,
2:=1
g
1
,
3:=1
g
2
,
4:=2
g
2
. At that mo-ment, the last entry (in the second column) of ST is filled and we get the deduction
4
g
1
=3
,which also implies
3
g
1
=4
. Then all entries inCT are known, and we can complete RT; thisleads to the coincidences
1=4
and
2=3
.Taking minimal care in defining new cosets(namely, if a coset
k
is defined, then sooner orlater we define
kg
for all
g
∈
E
), it is guaranteedthat the algorithm terminates if
|
G
:
H
|
<
∞
.However, there is no recursive function of
|
G
:
H
|
and the input length which would bound thenumber of cosets defined during the procedure.It is easy to give presentations of the trivialgroup such that no commonly used variant of the Todd-Coxeter algorithm can handle them.This, and different coset enumeration strate-gies, are discussed, for example, in [13, Ch. 5].A very accessible, elementary description of themethods is in [10]. Success mostly depends onthe number of entries defined in the coset tablerather than
|
G
:
H
|
. There are instances of suc-cessful enumeration with
|
G
:
H
|
>
10
6
.If we do not have a candidate for a smallindex subgroup
H
in
G
, we may try programswhich find some or all subgroups of
G
withindex at most a given bound
n
. These programsconsider all coset tables with at most
n
rows anduse a backtrack search to eliminate those whichare not consistent with the given relators. De-pending on the complexity of the presentation,in some cases we can expect success for valuesof
n
up to about 100.An alternative method to coset enumerationis the
Knuth-Bendix term-rewriting procedure
[13]. We collect a list of pairs of words
(
u,v
)
suchthat
u,v
represent the same element of
G
. Thesepairs are called
rewriting rules
, since we can re-place a word
w
1
uw
2
by
w
1
vw
2
. The goal is tocollect a
confluent
system of rules: no matter inwhich order the rules are applied, every word inthe generators is converted into a unique nor-mal form. Although the usual problems of un-decidability arise, Knuth-Bendix methods cansometimes solve the word problem for infinitegroups, which can almost never be done by cosetenumeration techniques.An interesting recent development is the de-finition and the algorithmic handling of
auto- matic groups
. These are groups with solvableword problem and include important groupclasses occurring in topology, such as the fun-damental groups of compact hyperbolic and Eu-clidean manifolds and of hyperbolic manifoldsof finite volume, word hyperbolic groups, andgroups satisfying various small cancellationproperties.If a presentation for a subgroup
H
≤
G
isneeded, Schreier’s subgroup lemma may be usedto obtain generators for
H
.
Lemma 1.1.
Let
T
be a right transversal for
H
in
G
=
S
, and, for
g
∈
G
, let
g
denote the el-ement of
T
such that
g
∈
Hg
. Then
{
tsts
−
1
:
t
∈
T,s
∈
S
}
generates
H
.
Using the fact that words representing sub-group elements can be rewritten as products of Schreier generators, one may obtain a presen-tation for
H
[13, Ch. 6]. This presentation isusually highly redundant, and it can be shortened by applying the so-called
Tietze transformations
[13, Ch. 1]. It is often worthwhile to do Tietzetransformations interactively, guiding the com-puter to the type of presentation we try toachieve.
Polycyclic Groups
In the rest of this survey, we shall almost ex-clusively deal with groups for which the unde-cidability of the word problem vanishes. This willclearly be the case with finite groups given, forexample, as permutation or matrix groups, but
Figure 2.
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seress
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