Computing in the Monster (Q5928889)

The author speculates on various possible methods of computing in the Monster sporadic simple group. The huge size of this group makes this a hard problem, but it seems clear that any efficient system must make use of fast computation in one or more (large) subgroups. Explicit descriptions of several such subgroups are given, together with some results obtained by such computations. In the five years between submission and publication of this article, another practical method of computing in the Monster has been developed by the reviewer, with \textit{P. Walsh}, \textit{R. Parker} and \textit{S. Linton} [J. Group Theory 1, No. 4, 307-337 (1998; Zbl 0923.20011)] and is being used to answer several long-standing questions about this group.