Name shared with https://www.symbolica.ai , a Vinod Khosla-backed start up.
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Symbolica Computer Algebra System
21–30 of 126 posts
Re: Symbolica Computer Algebra System
#22What’s the use case overlap between symbolic and huge? I might expect that with most huge expressions (they talk about disk space being the limit, not memory) you’d be satisfied with a numerical approximation. Does someone need to simplify a huge expression down to a small symbolic expression?
One use case is in theoretical physics, where expressions that take up about a terabyte are generated when computing Feynman diagrams, but only in the intermediate stages. By the end of a two-month computation you get a result similar to equation 4.5 in this paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1707.01044
An exact answer is desired since the final result reveals some structure that can be studied, and because it is very hard to get a numerical result due to the occurrence of spurious poles. For example, evaluating
(1-x)/x - 1/x
numerically is challenging around x=0 even though symbolically it can be made regular.
Re: Symbolica Computer Algebra System
#23I feel like this is missing some comparisons to Sympy and Mathematica. Probably it's more polished than Sympy, but if I'm going to closed-software software why would I pick this over MMA?
It depends on what you want to do. It should be much faster than Sympy and it is often much faster than Mathematica, for example if you do pattern matching or are manipulating rational polynomials.
The idea of Symbolica is that you can use it as a library inside your existing projects, which is harder to do with MM since it is its own ecosystem.
Moreover, for personal projects Symbolica is free.
Re: Symbolica Computer Algebra System
#24> Sometimes a Symbolica license key is needed on a machine that is not connected to the internet. For this purpose, an offline key that is valid for 24 hours can be generated from a valid license key on a machine that is connected to the internet. Even Mathematica doesn't pull shit like that.
Author of Symbolica here: this may change in the future. Note that it is easy to do this, you just call the function from symbolica import \* set_license_key('YOUR_KEY') print(get_offline_license_key())
Hi. Nice work, I'm really glad to see a new CAS and this is an area that is close to my heart. The problem I have isn't so much that it's difficult to jump through the licensing hoops (although anything is more difficult that not using licenses), it is that you put restrictions on the user of the software that your competitors don't have.
I make closed-source commercial software at my dayjob, I understand you want to get paid. The trouble is that a featureful CAS either takes decades to build by hand (e.g. Axiom) it relies on a huge amount of FOSS libraries (e.g. Sage), or both (e.g. Mathematica).
Making me "phone home" to check I'm up to date on my subscription to some algebra manipulation algorithms is a non-starter, especially when even a PhD student has to pay. (I know you have a single-threaded free version, but that didn't make much sense when your USP is speed.)
Re: Symbolica Computer Algebra System
#25Does this handle elimination of variables in a polynomial system (using an eliminating order for Groebner basis)?
Re: Symbolica Computer Algebra System
#26> a state-of-the-art commercial computer algebra system while being as open as possible > Get a license key for offline use, generated from a licensed Symbolica session. The key will remain valid for 24 hours. lmao This is a really impressive project, but the practically always-on requirement - including an internet connection to go offline - is absolutely hilarious. Also, the requirement for me to "get a quote" to g…
Author of Symbolica here: for your personal projects the cost is 0, as you'd be a hobbyist. Symbolica is developed by only one person, so forgive me if I can't get every aspect of the project right on the first try (especially the non-technical part) :) I will see about removing the online on start-up part. It's essentially the only anti-piracy step that I have. At the moment there is no fixed cost for use in industr…
Give people a ballpark single user price, and a note that discounts can be given for multiple users etc. If you don’t quote any price the assumption will be, “if you have to ask you can’t afford it.”
Re: Symbolica Computer Algebra System
#27It is an interesting combination of open source yet paid.
But the price is "Contact us for a quote"
Can't they at least give a ballpark number of what the price is? Matlab and Mathematica are about $1000-3000 per year for commercial license, they aren't hiding their price.
Re: Symbolica Computer Algebra System
#28Does this handle elimination of variables in a polynomial system (using an eliminating order for Groebner basis)?
Author here: you can generate the Groebner basis in lex order or compute a resultant, but it doesn't automatically backsubstitute the system at the moment. This is mostly because I haven't committed yet to a format to describe roots of polynomials. It's on the todo list though :)
Re: Symbolica Computer Algebra System
#29It is an interesting combination of open source yet paid. But the price is "Contact us for a quote" Can't they at least give a ballpark number of what the price is? Matlab and Mathematica are about $1000-3000 per year for commercial license, they aren't hiding their price.
Author here: thanks for the feedback. I will add a price range soon. The reason why it is not there in the first place is because I am thinking about site-wide licenses, which are often quote-based (also for Mathematica). For universities site-wide licenses are common, but for industry maybe less so. For reference, a university site-wide license is about 6000 EUR per year at the moment.
Re: Symbolica Computer Algebra System
#30Can confirm, it is fast. I've been struggling with a plane equation for a plane based on isotropic segments. 3 segments, 3 complex points - only 6 equations. Almost every CAS can solve the system per se fast, it's the simplification process that costs time. On my machine, I managed to get a ~300KB long solution from SymPy in under a minute, and a comparable solution from Maxima in a few seconds. Symbolica found a ~84…
Wow.
Could you share the equation/code you worked on?
I can't imagine a mathematical object being 84KB long, that's insanely huge