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Tweak limits for Minkwitz algorithm. The old bound were somewhat conservative on current systems. Esp. the total limit of 25000 was very low.

The old bound were somewhat conservative on current systems.
Esp. the total limit of 25000 was very low.
@fingolfin fingolfin added kind: enhancement Label for issues suggesting enhancements; and for pull requests implementing enhancements topic: library release notes: use title For PRs: the title of this PR is suitable for direct use in the release notes labels Dec 2, 2024
@fingolfin fingolfin requested a review from hulpke December 2, 2024 18:11
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Yes, this is a relic of olden times. Could even increase by a factor of 5 by now.

(There are other places where code sets memory usage limits. Do we want to have a general framework how much memory we consider appropriate for a routine to gobble?)

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Yeah perhaps we should think about a more systematic way to track such "magic numbers" and limits so that we can scale them better over time...

In the meantime, I am surprised that this change causes a regression with a relatively small example in the manual, in lib/ghomfp.gd:

##  The following example stems from a real request to the ⪆ Forum.
##  In September 2000 a ⪆ user working with puzzles wanted to express the
##  permutation <C>(1,2)</C> as a word as short as possible in particular
##  generators of the symmetric group <M>S_{16}</M>.
##  <P/>
##  <Example><![CDATA[
##  gap> perms := [ (1,2,3,7,11,10,9,5), (2,3,4,8,12,11,10,6),
##  >   (5,6,7,11,15,14,13,9), (6,7,8,12,16,15,14,10) ];;
##  gap> puzzle := Group( perms );;Size( puzzle );
##  20922789888000
##  gap> hom:=EpimorphismFromFreeGroup(puzzle:names:=["a", "b", "c", "d"]);;
##  gap> word := PreImagesRepresentative( hom, (1,2) );
##  a^-1*c*b*c^-1*a*b^-1*a^-2*c^-1*a*b^-1*c*b
##  gap> Length( word );
##  13

Apparently with this change, instead of a word of length 13 it finds one of length 57?

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