Sadly, from a computer science perspective there are more questions raised than answered.
Like how was it shown that this complicated system of algorithms was fast and accurate? (Requires testing). Is Sage better than the other open source programs on this task for usual (small?) cases or large. What is the relationship of exact and floating-point determinant calcs. How relevant is the Hadamard bound in actuality? Can floats or bigfloats be used to refine the bound? And I don't think you want to go down a road that suggests that only one program's results is OK (somehow implicitly checked??) if the program is open-source .. On Friday, October 24, 2014 5:55:39 PM UTC-7, jason wrote: > > The AMS Notices has a column about using computers to do math, dwelling > on some problems they had with Mathematica: > > http://www.ams.org/notices/201410/rnoti-p1249.pdf > > The HackerNews discussion immediately brings up Sage, of course: > https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8505665 > > Funny quote (that I don't necessarily agree with): "This resembles the > well- known Pentium division bug discovered by Thomas Nicely in 1994, > which only affected certain kinds of numbers. But it seems Mathematica > is a black box even darker that the internals of a microprocessor, so it > is difficult to try to understand what kinds of numbers are affected by > the Mathematica bug that we are describing." > > Interestingly, throughout the article, they emphasize what a hard time > they had when the found MMA and Maple conflicting, and the problems with > having MMA be closed-source. You'd think they'd end with a resounding > recommendation to use open-source software whereever possible, and fund > and motivate it's development. However, their final recommendation > backpedals quite a bit and is just "However, for the time being, when > dealing with a problem whose answer cannot be easily verified without a > computer, it is highly advisable to perform the computations with at > least two computer algebra systems." > > Thanks, > > Jason > > P.S. It would be interesting to see if Sage can do the calculation they > identified as buggy in mathematica. That would make for a cool > follow-up editorial. > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sage-devel" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
