Hypergroups and Twin Buildings, I

Abstract

We discuss a conjecture on thick twin buildings the verification of which is needed in order to show that thick twin buildings are mathematically equivalent to regular actions of certain twin Coxeter hypergroups. (A corresponding result for buildings is shown in [5; Sections 10.2, 10.3].) We prove that the conjecture holds in the case where the support of its sagittal has cardinality 2 and in the case where its sagittal has length at most 3. (Sagittals are defined in Section 1.) Our exposition is based on an earlier treatment of the subject; cf. [3].