gooley@sunb6 (Markian "Party Mineral" Gooley) (09/14/90)
[Reposted from sci.math] "Given a set of generators of a permutation group G and a target permutation P, find a shortest generator sequence realizing P." Okay, this is well known to be NP-hard. Are there any good heuristics for solving instances of it? What about for special cases -- say if G is nonabelian, or simple, or (say) the alternating group of order n? Mark. gooley@cs.uiuc.edu