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We outline how to turn the author's quasipolynomial-time graph isomorphism test into a construction of a canonical form within the same time bound. The proof involves a nontrivial modification of the central symmetry-breaking tool, the construction of a canonical relational structure of logarithmic arity on the ideal domain based on local certificates. 

Graph Isomorphism (GI) is one of a small number of natural algorithmic problems with unsettled complexity status in the P / NP theory: not expected to be NP-complete, yet not known to be solvable in polynomial time. Arguably, the GI problem boils down to filling the gap between symmetry and regularity, the former being defined in terms of automorphisms, the latter in terms of equations satisfied by numerical parameters. Recent progress on the complexity of GI relies on a combination of the asymptotic theory of permutation groups and asymptotic properties of highly regular combinatorial structures called coherent configurations. Group theory provides the tools to infer either global symmetry or global irregularity from local information, eliminating the symmetry/regularity gap in the relevant scenario; the resulting global structure is the subject of combinatorial analysis. These structural studies are melded in a divide-and-conquer algorithmic framework pioneered in the GI context by Eugene M. Luks (1980). 

The codewords of the homomorphism code aHom(G,H) are the affine homomorphisms between two finite groups, G and H, generalizing Hadamard codes. Following the work of Goldreich-Levin (1989), Grigorescu et al. (2006), Dinur et al. (2008), and Guo and Sudan (2014), we further expand the range of groups for which local list-decoding is possible up to mindist, the minimum distance of the code. In particular, for the first time, we do not require either G or H to be solvable. Specifically, we demonstrate a poly(1/epsilon) bound on the list size, i. e., on the number of codewords within distance (mindist-epsilon) from any received word, when G is either abelian or an alternating group, and H is an arbitrary (finite or infinite) group. We conjecture that a similar bound holds for all finite simple groups as domains; the alternating groups serve as the first test case. The abelian vs. arbitrary result permits us to adapt previous techniques to obtain efficient local list-decoding for this case. We also obtain efficient local list-decoding for the permutation representations of alternating groups (the codomain is a symmetric group) under the restriction that the domain G=A_n is paired with codomain H=S_m satisfying m < 2^{n-1}/sqrt{n}. The limitations on the codomain in the latter case arise from severe technical difficulties stemming from the need to solve the homomorphism extension (HomExt) problem in certain cases; these are addressed in a separate paper (Wuu 2018). We introduce an intermediate "semi-algorithmic" model we call Certificate List-Decoding that bypasses the HomExt bottleneck and works in the alternating vs. arbitrary setting. A certificate list-decoder produces partial homomorphisms that uniquely extend to the homomorphisms in the list. A homomorphism extender applied to a list of certificates yields the desired list.