English

A fast implementation of the Monster group

Group Theory 2024-01-24 v3

Abstract

Let M\mathbb{M} be the Monster group, which is the largest sporadic finite simple group, and has first been constructed in 1982 by Griess. In 1985 Conway has constructed a 196884-dimensional rational epresentation ρ\rho of M\mathbb{M} with matrix entries in Z[12]\mathbb{Z}[\frac{1}{2}]. We describe a new and very fast algorithm for performing the group operation in M\mathbb{M}. For an odd integer p>1p > 1 let ρp\rho_p be the representation ρ\rho with matrix entries taken modulo pp. We use a generating set Γ\Gamma of M\mathbb{M}, such that the operation of a generator in Γ\Gamma on an element of ρp\rho_p can easily be computed. We construct a triple (v1,v+,v)(v_1, v^+, v^-) of elements of the module ρ15\rho_{15}, such that an unknown gMg \in \mathbb{M} can be effectively computed as a word in Γ\Gamma from the images (v1g,v+g,vg)(v_1 g, v^+ g, v^- g). Our new algorithm based on this idea multiplies two random elements of M\mathbb{M} in less than 30~milliseconds on a standard PC with an Intel i7-8750H CPU at 4 GHz. This is more than 100000 times faster than estimated by Wilson in 2013.

Cite

@article{arxiv.2203.04223,
  title  = {A fast implementation of the Monster group},
  author = {Martin Seysen},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2203.04223},
  year   = {2024}
}

Comments

29 pages, 5 figures, submitted to Journal of Computational Algebra

R2 v1 2026-06-24T10:06:17.821Z