Re: [Axiom-developer] Comparison of CAS's?

[Vladimir Bondarenko]

> Gabriel Dos Reis <address@hidden> writes:
>
> > "Alasdair McAndrew" <address@hidden> writes:
> >
> > | As far as I know, nobody has tried to compare CAS's since Michael Wester's
> > | attempts in the 1990's.
> >
> > Not that I know of.  I believe Wester's work date back from late
> > 1990s.  Everywhere else in computer science, that would be an
> > eternity, but not in compuer algebra it seems...

Unfortunately, now, computer algebra is still in a deep mire. Even its 
most powerful representative, Mathematica 6, has (at least) thousands 
of distinct defects.

> > I believe many of his issues with Axioms are still unresolved.

About Windows version, I'd speak about at least 20,000 points in the 
source code to fix.

> Yes. By comparison, the MuPAD team runs the test suite with every new release
> and is now doing really well.

According to SciFace, I am the "best beta tester" of MuPAD.

http://groups.google.com/group/sci.math.symbolic/msg/05085553a1489bcc

"is now doing really well."

If you are speaking about MuPAD 4, I fully disagree with this.

MuPAD 4 fails at the simplest calculus examples where Derive 6,
Maple 11 and Mathematica 6 succeed.

> > You need to know all systems you compare in depth enough to make a fair
> > comparision.  Furthermore, CASes are to solve problems.  So you have to come
> > up with realistic problems to solve and express the solutions in "native
> > styles" for each of them.
>
> Well, this is one approach.  However, I think that this setting is not as
> realistic as it may seem.  Many researchers I know indeed use one tool for
> this, another one for that, and they avoid general purpose CAS altogether.
> (Others don't, of course.  I'd say it's a small majority that uses mainly
> general purpose CAS.)
>
> Even though Mathematica does better than Axiom on Wester's suite, I prefer
> Axiom, because it provides more possibilities, and after a while, I find it
> easier to use.  A good example is the demonstration of Cayley's 
> theorem on the
> characteristic polynomial, as pointed out by Francois Maltey recently.
>
> > From a user's perspective, I believe that MuPAD is currently the best CAS
> around.

I am upset to hear this.

For practical, applied tasks, MuPAD 4 is the weakest CAS I have ever
seen over the last 10 years, with lots of regression bugs and new howlers.

If we speak about practical computational tasks, Mathematica 6 is a
kind of tipsy grad student... MuPAD 4 is a semi-crazy froshie.

> However, it's programming language has some severe limitations, which
> Aldor does not have.
>
> On the other hand, Axiom is free, and MuPAD is not, not even gratis anymore.
>
> Apart from all that, if our goal was to make Axiom pass more tests of 
> Wester's
> suite, we need Gruntz algorithm for limits and an implementation of 
> Zeilberger
> for summation, as far as I recall.  However, I think that this is not 
> quite the
> right way to go about it.
>
>
>
> Martin

I am shocked to observe that it looks like AXIOM developers have
an idea that "there are not so many defects in AXIOM".

If you will keep thinking the same way forgetting about the quality
assurance problems, you never reach your 30-years goal of getting a 
powerful dependable AXIOM.

Frankly, a big problem I see, there is not a single practical
QA engineer within AXIOM folks.

Many of you are top-notch, amazing developers. There is a huge gap 
between a developer and a QA engineer.

Best wishes,

Vladimir Bondarenko

VM and GEMM architect Co-founder, CEO, Mathematical Director

http://www.cybertester.com/  Cyber Tester, LLC 
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