TWO AUTOMATIC SPANNING TREES IN SMALL CANCELLATION GROUP PRESENTATIONS

Gersten and Short showed that group presentations satisfying certain minimal small cancellation conditions are automatic. The automatic structure they described does not have unique group element representatives. It is easy, however, to modify their language to produce an automatic spanning tree of geodesics: that is, an automatic structure of geodesics which is both prefix-closed and has unique representatives. When combined with a construction showing that all geodesic representatives of a group element are encoded in a tiling of a particular geometric form, this shows that in fact the language of lexicographically least geodesics is also automatic (it is clearly a spanning tree).