A User's Guide to the Mapping Class Group: Once Punctured Surfaces

This document is a practical guide to computations using an automatic structure for the mapping class group of a once-punctured, oriented surface $S$. We describe a quadratic time algorithm for the word problem in this group, which can be implemented efficiently with pencil and paper. The input of the algorithm is a word, consisting of ``chord diagrams'' of ideal triangulations and elementary moves, which represents an element of the mapping class group. The output is a word called a ``normal form'' that uniquely represents the same group element.