The hyperplanes of the near hexagon related to the extended ternary Golay code (Q2273258)

Let \({\mathbb E}_1\) be the near hexagon related to the extended ternary Golay code. The authors show that \({\mathbb E}_1\) contains \(2^{24} -1\) hyperplanes, which fall into 25 isomorphism classes. Two of these classes are special, namely the singular hyperplanes, which consists of the points of distance at most \(2\) to some given point, and the ovoids, which are hyperplanes containing no lines. There are 36 ovoids, which can be divided into 12 equivalence classes by calling two ovoids equivalent if they are equal or disjoint. The sum of two subsets of \({\mathbb E}_1\) is defined as the complement of the symmetric difference. The authors prove that every hyperplane can be uniquely written as the sum of a collection of mutually non-equivalent ovoids. The classification is given in terms of the number of ovoids needed for this description. It is also shown that each hyperplane can be written as the sum of singular hyperplanes. Since singular hyperplanes can easily be implemented, this allows for a complete enumeration of the hyperplanes on a computer. For the classification itself, the computer is not needed.