That would be an improvement, but still wouldn't be a solution. At some point, we have to live with the fact that comparison in finitely presented groups will only work reliably if we are lucky. What we can do is try to make the set of "lucky" groups bigger. And at some point that will come at the expense of time and/or memory.
But it would be definitely worth it to take advantage of what gap has already done in that direction. But beware, their approach consists in trying until it can prove that the elements are equal (or that they are not equal). That means that if you are in one of the unlucky cases, just comparing two elements will start to consume 100% of your cpu for the eternity (or until the RAM is exhausted, whatever happens first). If you want to play with a presentation with non decidable word problem, you can try to paste this in a gap session: F := FreeGroup("a","b","c","d","e","p","q","r","t","k"); a:=F.1; b:=F.2; c:=F.3; d:=F.4; e:=F.5; p:=F.6; q:=F.7; r:=F.8; t:=F.9; k:=F.10; G:=F/[p^10*a/(a*p), p^10*b/(b*p), p^10*c/(c*p), p^10*d/(d*p), p^10*e/(e*p), q*a/(a*q^10), q*b/(b*q^10), q*c/(c*q^10), q*d/(d*q^10), q*e/(e*q^10),r*a/r/a,r*b/r/b, r*c/r/c, r*d/r/d, r*e/r/e, p*a*c*q*r/(r*p*c*a*q), p^2*a*d*q^2*r/(r*p^2*d*a*q^2), p^3*b*c*q^3*r/(r*p^3*c*b*q^3), p^4*b*d*q^4*r/(r*p^4*d*b*q^4), p^5*c*e*q^5*r/(r*p^5*e*c*a*q^5), p^6*d*e*q^6*r/(r*p^6*e*d*q^6), p^7*c*d*c*q^7/(p^7*c*d*c*e*q^7), p^8*c*a*a*a*q^8/(r*p^8*a*a*a*q^8), p^9*d*a*a*a*q^9*r/(r*p^9*a*a*a*q^9), p*t/p/t, q*t/q/t, k*(a*a*a)^(-1)*t*(a*a*a)/(k/(a*a*a)*t*a*a*a )]; Then try to compare two elements of G. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sage-devel" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.