TOWARDS CLASSIFYING TORIC DEGENERATIONS OF CUBIC SURFACES.

We investigate the class of degenerations of smooth cubic surfaces which are obtained from degenerating their Cox rings to toric algebras. More precisely, we work in the spirit of Sturmfels and Xu who use the theory of Khovanskii bases to determine toric degenerations of Del Pezzo surfaces of degree 4 and who leave the question of classifying these degenerations in the degree 3 case as an open problem. In order to carry out this classification we describe an approach which is closely related to tropical geometry and present partial results in this direction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]