Computing a link diagram from its exterior (Q6145673)

In this paper, the authors give the first practical algorithm to find a diagram of a knot in the 3-space given a triangulation of its exterior. That is, the main problem being considered is: FIND DIAGRAM. Input a triangulation \(\mathcal{T}\) of a knot exterior \(E(K)\), output a diagram of the knot \(K\). Precisely, the input of their algorism is; (a) an ideal triangulation of a compact 3-manifold with toroidal boundary, with an essential simple closed curve for each boundary component, and (b) a sequence of Pachner moves transforming the layered filling triangulation of the manifold obtained by Dehn filling along the given simple closed curve into a specific 2-tetrahedra base triangulation of the 3-sphere. They actually implement the algorithm in Python. In practice, to get the part (b) of Input, a heuristic simplification method is applied to the input triangulation by using Pachner moves. The algorithm is actually practical; for example, experimental mean running time is reported as \(O(1.07^n)\), where \(n\) is the number of tetrahedra in the input triangulation. There are several applications; an interesting one is to obtain a ``simple'' Dehn surgery presentation of the well-known Seifert-Weber dodecahedral space.