Pasch trades on the projective triple system of order 31

We determine all 120 nonisomorphic systems obtainable from the projective Steiner triple system of order 31 by at most three Pasch trades. Exactly three of these, each corresponding to three Pasch trades, are rigid. Thus three Pasch trades suffice, and are required, in order to convert the projective system of order 31 to a rigid system. This contrasts with the projective system of order 15 where four Pasch trades are required. We also show that four Pasch trades are required in order to convert the projective system of order 63 to a rigid system

Linear Complexity Hexahedral Mesh Generation

We show that any polyhedron forming a topological ball with an even number of quadrilateral sides can be partitioned into O(n) topological cubes, meeting face to face. The result generalizes to non-simply-connected polyhedra satisfying an additional bipartiteness condition. The same techniques can also be used to reduce the geometric version of the hexahedral mesh generation problem to a finite case analysis amenable to machine solution.Comment: 12 pages, 17 figures. A preliminary version of this paper appeared at the 12th ACM Symp. on Computational Geometry. This is the final version, and will appear in a special issue of Computational Geometry: Theory and Applications for papers from SCG '9

Identical twin Steiner triple systems

Two Steiner triple systems, each containing precisely one Pasch configuration which, when traded, switches one system to the other, are called twin Steiner triple systems. If the two systems are isomorphic the systems are called identical twins. Hitherto, identical twins were only known for orders 21, 27 and 33. In this paper we construct infinite families of identical twin Steiner triple systems

Universal Cycles for Minimum Coverings of Pairs by Triples, with Application to 2-Radius Sequences

A new ordering, extending the notion of universal cycles of Chung {\em et al.} (1992), is proposed for the blocks of $k$-uniform set systems. Existence of minimum coverings of pairs by triples that possess such an ordering is established for all orders. Application to the construction of short 2-radius sequences is given, with some new 2-radius sequences found through computer search.Comment: 18 pages, to appear in Mathematics of Computatio

Quasi-Linear Cellular Automata

Simulating a cellular automaton (CA) for t time-steps into the future requires t^2 serial computation steps or t parallel ones. However, certain CAs based on an Abelian group, such as addition mod 2, are termed ``linear'' because they obey a principle of superposition. This allows them to be predicted efficiently, in serial time O(t) or O(log t) in parallel. In this paper, we generalize this by looking at CAs with a variety of algebraic structures, including quasigroups, non-Abelian groups, Steiner systems, and others. We show that in many cases, an efficient algorithm exists even though these CAs are not linear in the previous sense; we term them ``quasilinear.'' We find examples which can be predicted in serial time proportional to t, t log t, t log^2 t, and t^a for a < 2, and parallel time log t, log t log log t and log^2 t. We also discuss what algebraic properties are required or implied by the existence of scaling relations and principles of superposition, and exhibit several novel ``vector-valued'' CAs.Comment: 41 pages with figures, To appear in Physica

Packing random graphs and hypergraphs

We determine to within a constant factor the threshold for the property that two random k-uniform hypergraphs with edge probability p have an edge-disjoint packing into the same vertex set. More generally, we allow the hypergraphs to have different densities. In the graph case, we prove a stronger result, on packing a random graph with a fixed graph