In August 2015 Rebecca Waldecker visited St Andrews, funded by CoDiMa, to explore possibilities of collaboration using her knowledge of permutation groups and our knowledge of computational methods.

In our discussions we found out that search in permutation groups is a topic that intersects our interests, and Rebecca suggested that we should apply for a grant from Deutsche Forschungsgesellschaft (DFG) to fund mutual visits over the course of a year to continue our collaboration.

Rebecca’s application has been successful and we will receive 6460 EUR in travel support for two visits by Rebecca Waldecker to St Andrews and two visits by Chris Jefferson and Markus Pfeiffer to Halle.

We are planning to attack the theory and practice of search in permutation groups such as group intersection, automorphisms of structures, canonical images and parallelisation.

With our different backgrounds in group theory and computation, we would also like to make the theory more accessible to programmers, and the practical aspects more accessible to mathematicians.

What makes this topic even more exciting and promising is Babai’s most recent publication on the complexity of the graph isomorphism problem.