English

Some new Steiner designs $S(2,6,91)$

Combinatorics 2025-09-30 v2

Abstract

The Kramer-Mesner method for constructing designs with a prescribed automorphism group GG has proven effective many times. In the special case of Steiner designs, the task reduces to solving an exact cover problem, with the advantage that fast backtracking solvers like Donald Knuth's dancing links and dancing cells can be used. We find ways to encode the inherent symmetry of the problem space, induced by the action of the normalizer of GG, into a single instance of the exact cover problem. This eliminates redundant computations of certain isomorphic search branches, while preventing the overhead caused by repeatedly restarting the solver. Our improved approach is applied to the parameters S(2,6,91)S(2,6,91). Previously, only four such Steiner designs were known, all of which had been constructed as cyclic designs over four decades ago. We find 2323 new designs, each with full automorphism group of order 8484.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2504.04293,
  title  = {Some new Steiner designs $S(2,6,91)$},
  author = {Michael Kiermaier and Vedran Krčadinac and Vladimir D. Tonchev and Renata Vlahović Kruc and Alfred Wassermann},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2504.04293},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

14 pages, 3 tables

R2 v1 2026-06-28T22:48:17.277Z