On polynomial reduction of problems based on diagonal Latin squares to the exact cover problem

The paper discusses the reduction of problems based on Latin squares to the exact cover problem aiming at its subsequent solution using the dancing links algorithm. The former problems include generation of Latin squares and diagonal Latin squares of a general form/with a given normalization, generation of orthogonal Latin and diagonal Latin squares directly/through the set of transversals, obtaining a set of transversals for a given square, forming a subset of disjoint transversals. For each subproblem, we describe in detail the process of forming the corresponding binary coverage matrices. We show that the use of the proposed approach in comparison with the classical one, i.e. the formation of sets of transversals and their coverages using exhaustive enumeration, allows one to increase the eective processing pace of diagonal Latin squares by 2.5{5.6 times. The developed software implementations of the algorithms are used in computational experiments as part of the Gerasim@Home volunteer distributed computing project on the BOINC platform