Faster Canonical Forms for Primitive Coherent Configurations
Xiaorui Sun, John Wilmes · 2015
Primitive coherent configurations (PCCs) are edge-colored digraphs that generalize strongly regular graphs (SRGs), a class perceived as difficult for Graph Isomorphism (GI). Moreover, PCCs arise naturally as obstacles to combinatorial divide-and-conquer approaches for general GI. In a natural sense, the isomorphism problem for PCCs is a stepping stone between SRGs and general GI. In his 1981 paper in the Annals of Math., Babai proposed a combinatorial approach to GI testing via an analysis of the standard individualization/refinement (I/R) technique and proved that I/R yields canonical forms of PCCs in time exp(~O(n1/2)). (The tilde hides polylogarithmic factors.) We improve this bound to exp(~O(n1/3)). This is faster than the current best bound, exp(~O(n1/2)), for general GI, and subsumes Spielman's exp(~O(n1/3)) bound for SRGs (STOC'96, only recently improved to exp(~O(n1/5)) by the present authors and their coauthors (FOCS'13)).