A typical census of 3-manifolds contains all manifolds (under various constraints) that can be triangulated with at most n tetrahedra. Al- though censuses are useful resources for mathematicians, constructing them is difficult: the best algorithms to
date have not gone beyond n = 12. The underlying algorithms essentially (i) enumerate all relevant 4-regular multigraphs on n nodes, and then (ii) for each multigraph G they enumerate possible 3-manifold triangulations with G as their dual 1-skeleton, of which there could be exponentially many. In practice, a small number of multigraphs often dominate the running times of census algorithms: for example, in a typical census on 10 tetrahedra, almost half of the running time is spent on just 0.3% of the graphs. Here we present a new algorithm for stage (ii), which is the computational bottleneck in this process. The key idea is to build triangulations by recursively constructing neighbourhoods of edges, in contrast to traditional algorithms which recursively glue together pairs of tetrahedron faces. We implement this algorithm, and find experimentally that whilst the overall performance is mixed, the new algorithm runs significantly faster on those pathological multigraphs for which existing methods are extremely slow. In this way the old and new algorithms complement one another, and together can yield significant performance improvements over either method alone.
To enumerate 3-manifold triangulations with a given property, one typically begins with a set of potential face pairing graphs (also known as dual 1-skeletons), and then attempts to flesh each graph out into full triangulations using an exponential-t
ime enumeration. However, asymptotically most graphs do not result in any 3-manifold triangulation, which leads to significant wasted time in topological enumeration algorithms. Here we give a new algorithm to determine whether a given face pairing graph supports any 3-manifold triangulation, and show this to be fixed parameter tractable in the treewidth of the graph. We extend this result to a meta-theorem by defining a broad class of properties of triangulations, each with a corresponding fixed parameter tractable existence algorithm. We explicitly implement this algorithm in the most generic setting, and we identify heuristics that in practice are seen to mitigate the large constants that so often occur in parameterised complexity, highlighting the practicality of our techniques.
