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intro.xml            recogbase package documentation
                                                             Max Neunhoeffer
                                                                 Ákos Seress

       Copyright (C) 2005-2008 by the authors.

This chapter gives a short introduction and explains the philosophy
behind the package.

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<Chapter Label="intro">
<Heading>Introduction</Heading>

<Section Label="philosophy">
<Heading>Philosophy</Heading>

This package is about group recognition. It provides a generic
framework to implement methods of group recognition, regardless of
what computational representation is used. This means, that the code
in this package is useful at least for permutation groups, matrix
groups, projective groups and for the context of black box groups.
The setup is described in <Cite Key="IssacRecog"/>. <P/>

The framework allows to build composition trees and handles the builtup 
and usage of these trees in a generic way. It also contains a
method selection (described in Chapter <Ref Chap="methsel"/>) that allows 
install recognition methods in a convenient way and that automatically
tries to try the different available methods in a sensible order.
</Section>

<Section Label="overview">
<Heading>Overview over this manual</Heading>

Chapter <Ref Chap="install"/> describes the installation of this package.
Chapter <Ref Chap="recognition"/> describes the generic, recursive procedure
used for group recognition throughout this package. At the heart of this
procedure is the definition of <Q>FindHomomorphism</Q> methods, which is
also described in that chapter. For the choice of the right method
for finding a homomorphism (or an isomorphism) we use another generic
procedure, the <Q>method selection</Q> which is not to be confused with
the &GAP; method selection. Our own method selection is described in detail
in Chapter <Ref Chap="methsel"/>, because it is interesting in its own 
right and might be useful in other circumstances. Finally, in Chapter
<Ref Chap="afterrecog"/> we describe, what one can do with a completed
recognition tree.

</Section>

<Section Label="feedback">
<Heading>Feedback</Heading>

For bug reports, feature requests and suggestions, please use our
<URL Text="issue tracker">https://github.com/neunhoef/recogbase/issues</URL>.

</Section>

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</Chapter>
