Note: I normally dislike doing crossposts between SE sites, but the tag info under gap-system at StackOverflow (where I think the question primarily belongs) says
Questions on GAP may get much more attention if being asked under the (gap) tag at Mathematics Q&A site: https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/gap
so I repeat my question Dancing Links in GAP here.
I am working on a combinatorics problem that has connections to group theory, and I decided to do the group theoretic part in GAP (b/c GAP is really efficient in that area). Now, the computations involve finding an exact cover in a certain configuration, and the most straightforward way to tackle this is using Knuth's Algorithm X for backtracking.
I was wondering (especially since the 'A' in 'GAP' stands for 'Algorithms') whether a GAP implementation of the Algorithm X / Dancing Links has already been implemented and can be reused. I haven't found anything about it in the docs; has anyone else come across something like that?
I am unaware of any implementation of dancing links. Building one would not be too difficult. However, consider if it would be easier to use blists, or lists.
While I don't know exactly what your problem is (so I might be wrong!) while dancing links are very cute they are often a bad choice, as they require so many objects and pointer dereferences.