This project continues research in the area of manipulation of finite groups and estimation of their parameters. Algorithms for finite groups and their associated Cayley graphs have a wide range of applications in mathematics and computer science. These applications range from problems related to the classification of finite simple groups to the mixing rate of Markov chains, the design of interconnection networks for large interacting arrays of CPU's, the graph isomorphism problem (of relevance to chemical documentation), and group-based cryptography (such as DES). The principal consumers of the expected results will be the areas of computational group theory and the complexity theory of algorithms; but applications arise in the other areas mentioned as well.
