On Short Expressions for Cosets of Permutation Subgroups

Abstract

Following Babai’s algorithm (Graph isomorphism in quasipolynomial time, arXiv:1512.03547v2, 2016) for the string isomorphism problem, we determine that it is possible to write expressions of short length describing certain permutation cosets, including all permutation subgroups. This is feasible both in the original version of the algorithm and in its CFSG-free version, by Babai (2016, §13.1) and Pyber (A CFSG-free analysis of Babai’s quasipolynomial GI algorithm, arXiv:1605.08266, 2016). The existence of such descriptions gives a weak form of the Cameron–Maróti classification, even without assuming CFSG. This is applicable to proofs of diameter bounds for \(\mathrm {Alt}(n)\) as in Helfgott (Growth in linear algebraic groups and permutation groups: towards a unified perspective, arXiv:1804.03049, 2018): our main result is used in Dona (Towards a CFSG-free diameter bound for \({\mathrm{Alt}}(n)\), arXiv:1810.02710v3, 2018) to free Helfgott’s proof from the use of CFSG. We also thoroughly explicate Babai’s recursion process (as given in Helfgott et al. in Graph isomorphisms in quasi-polynomial time, arXiv:1710.04574, 2017) and obtain explicit constants for the runtime of the algorithm, both with and without the use of CFSG.