Deciding Conjugacy in Thompson's Group F in Linear Time

Abstract

We present an efficient implementation of the solution to the conjugacy problem in Thompson's group F, a certain infinite group whose elements are piecewise-linear homeomorphisms of the unit interval. This algorithm checks for conjugacy by constructing and comparing directed graphs called strand diagrams. We provide a comprehensive description of our solution algorithm, including the data structure that stores strand diagrams and methods to simplify them. We prove that our algorithm theoretically achieves a linear time bound in the size of the input, and we present a quadratic time working solution.