Hyperbolic buildings, affine buildings, and automatic groups (Q1913305)

The word ``hyperbolic'' in the title refers to the property of metric spaces that every side of any triangle is at fixed bounded distance from the union of the two other sides. A finitely generated group is called hyperbolic if its Cayley graph (with respect to some and hence every generating set) is. For Coxeter groups, one can consider the word metric to obtain word hyperbolic Coxeter groups. The authors essentially show that the chamber graph of a building whose corresponding Weyl group is a word hyperbolic Coxeter group, is itself hyperbolic, and vice versa. Furthermore, they consider \(\widetilde A_n\)-groups, i.e. groups which act regulary on the set of vertices of an affine building of type \(\widetilde A_n\) and whose elements act type-rotating (i.e. fixing no or all types). The authors prove that every finitely generated \(\widetilde A_n\)-group is bi-automatic.