Output details

Constructive membership in black-box groups

<12>This paper introduced the so-called “three-centralizers algorithm” a completely new way of approaching the problem of expressing a group element as a word in the group generators, a key problem in many situations in modern computational group theory. This algorithm provided the last step in the completion of the major research programme led by Babai and Beals to show that recognition of arbitrary black-box groups can be completed in polynomial time. It has also proved practically useful and provides the best known method for the case of large simple matrix groups, incorporated in widely used Magma and GAP programs.