Semigroups in Python

This part of the tutorial relates to using the functionality of libsemigroups in Python via the Python package libsemigroups_pybind11.

Unlike the Semigroups package for GAP, libsemigroups_pybind11 provides only direct low-level access to the functionality of libsemigroups. This means that libsemigroups_pybind11 does not provide any higher-level constructs (like semigroups, homomorphisms, and so on), but gives fine-grained control of the specific algorithms from libsemigroups. For an overview of the algorithms available in libsemigroups and/or libsemigroups_pybind11, see the libsemigroups documentation or the libsemigroups_pybind11 documentation.

The higher-level constructs in the Semigroups package for GAP make some choices for you about the best way to compute a particular thing. For example, if you ask GAP for the size of a finitely presented semigroup, it will run in parallel some variants of Todd-Coxeter, Knuth-Bendix, and will try to compute the small overlap class of the presentation. This works well in many cases, but for some hard cases may not be enough, which is where the fine-grained control offered by libsemigroups_pybind11 comes into play.

This part of this tutorial consists of:

• Installing libsemigroups_pybind11
• First steps
• Semigroups and monoids defined by generators
• Finitely presented semigroups and monoids
• Worksheet