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Abstract

The states of the title are a set of knot types which suffice to create a generating set for the Kauffman bracket skein module of a manifold. The minimum number of states is a topological invariant, but quite difficult to compute. In this paper we show that a set of states determines a generating set for the ring of $SL_2(C)$ characters of the fundamental group, which in turn provides estimates of the invariant.