Generating Plane Quadrangulations and Symmetry-preserving Operations on Maps

Abstract

Lopsp-operations are operations on maps that are applied locally and are guaranteed to preserve all the orientation-preserving symmetries of maps. Well-known examples of such operations are dual, ambo, truncation, and leapfrog. They are described by plane 3-coloured triangulations with specific properties. We developed and implemented a program that can generate all lopsp-operations of a given size by reducing the problem of generating lopsp-operations to generating all plane quadrangulations that are not necessarily simple. We extended the program plantri to generate these quadrangulations.