Exhaustive generation of combinatorial objects by ECO

The problem of exhaustively generating combinatorial objects can currently be applied to many disciplines, such as biology, chemistry, medicine and computer science. A well known approach to the exhaustive generation problem is given by the Gray code scheme for listing n-bit binary numbers in such a way that successive numbers differ in exactly one bit position. In this work, we introduce an exhaustive generation algorithm, which is general for the classes of succession rules considered in [1]. We also show that our algorithm is efficient in an amortized sense; it actually uses only a constant amount of computation per object.Received: 10 October 2003, Revised: 10 February 2004, Published online: 21 April 2004