Groups with arbitrarily poor permutation stability

Abstract

We propose a quantitative notion of permutation stability for finitely generated groups. Our notion is related to, but distinct from, the ``stability rate'' introduced by Becker and Mosheiff (which is valid within the class of finitely presented groups). We construct a family of finitely generated stable groups which exhibit, quantitatively, arbitrarily ``bad'' permutation stability. This means that any application of a ``sample-and-substitute'' algorithm will be very slow in ascertaining whether a given tuple of permutations satisfy the defining relations of our groups.