An edge-based framework for enumerating 3-manifold triangulations

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new edge-based recursive algorithm for enumerating 3-manifold triangulations, significantly improving performance on complex cases and complementing existing face-gluing methods.

Contribution

The authors develop and implement an edge-based recursive algorithm that enhances enumeration efficiency for complex multigraphs in 3-manifold census construction.

Findings

Significant speedup on challenging multigraphs

Complementary performance with existing algorithms

Potential to extend census sizes beyond current limits

Abstract

A typical census of 3-manifolds contains all manifolds (under various constraints) that can be triangulated with at most n tetrahedra. Al- though censuses are useful resources for mathematicians, constructing them is difficult: the best algorithms to date have not gone beyond n = 12. The underlying algorithms essentially (i) enumerate all relevant 4-regular multigraphs on n nodes, and then (ii) for each multigraph G they enumerate possible 3-manifold triangulations with G as their dual 1-skeleton, of which there could be exponentially many. In practice, a small number of multigraphs often dominate the running times of census algorithms: for example, in a typical census on 10 tetrahedra, almost half of the running time is spent on just 0.3% of the graphs. Here we present a new algorithm for stage (ii), which is the computational bottleneck in this process. The key idea is to build triangulations by recursively constructing neighbourhoods of edges, in contrast to traditional algorithms which recursively glue together pairs of tetrahedron faces. We implement this algorithm, and find experimentally that whilst the overall performance is mixed, the new algorithm runs significantly faster on those "pathological" multigraphs for which existing methods are extremely slow. In this way the old and new algorithms complement one another, and together can yield significant performance improvements over either method alone.