Finding large counterexamples by selectively exploring the Pachner graph
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We often rely on censuses of triangulations to guide our intuition in 3-manifold topology. However, this can lead to misplaced faith in conjectures if the smallest counterexamples are too large to appear in our census. Since the number of triangulations increases super-exponentially with size, there is no way to expand a census beyond relatively small triangulations; the current census only goes up to 10 tetrahedra. Here, we show that it is feasible to search for large and hard-to-find counterexamples by using heuristics to selectively (rather than exhaustively) enumerate triangulations. We use this idea to find counterexamples to three conjectures which ask, for certain 3-manifolds, whether one-vertex triangulations always have a "distinctive" edge that would allow us to recognise the 3-manifold.
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