An Efficient Algorithm to Compute the Colored Jones Polynomial

Abstract

The colored Jones polynomial is a knot invariant that plays a central role in low dimensional topology. We give a simple and an efficient algorithm to compute the colored Jones polynomial of any knot. Our algorithm utilizes the walks along a braid model of the colored Jones polynomial that was refined by Armond from the work of Huynh and L\^e. The walk model gives rise to ordered words in a $q$-Weyl algebra which we address and study from multiple perspectives. We provide a highly optimized Mathematica implementation that exploits the modern features of the software. We include a performance analysis for the running time of our algorithm. Our implementation of the algorithm shows that our method usually runs in faster time than the existing state-of the-art method by an order of magnitude.