Tim, I like both ideas: a potential journal as well as for the ISSAC CD. ACM has the wherewithal to launch a journal like this, but we'd have to do prototypes like you suggest. Possible starting points are the ISSAC Proceedings, or a special issue of either Communications in Computer Algebra or Transactions on Mathematical Software.
How would you propose to handle submissions that include a Mathematica or Maple literate program? Should we ask commercial vendors to include trial versions? Or perhaps we could link this to Manuel Bronstein's idea of a SIGSAM server running commercial and free computer algebra software that members could connect to. How do you think we should start this? What's the first step? The idea of a journal accepting software as well as articles has been around for a while. I remember when I was at RISC-Linz over ten years ago, people were talking about getting the JSC to accept and test programs to accompany articles. --Emil On Mon, Sep 05, 2005 at 10:28:03PM -0400, root wrote: > Emil, et. al. > > For the past two years I've been building the proceedings CD that gets > distributed at ISSAC. This has been interesting but not really breaking > any new ground. And the process starts at the last minute so there is > very little time to do anything but get the CD assembled. > > This year I'd like to consider something more interesting and to do that > I need to start much earlier (now). > > Consider the following idea: > > You are giving a talk about a new algorithm. During the talk you give > out the URL which contains a copy of your paper. The paper is a literate > program which contains latex plus the full source code. > > A person in the audience can put a special Live CD in their laptop (which > boots linux but does not change their hard drive). They open a browser. > They surf to the given URL. They "drag and drop" your paper onto their > machine, it compiles, installs, and is set up to run. > > Now the person in the audience can actually execute your algorithm while > you are giving your talk. > > This is the "Doyen" idea. It can be applied in all of the science > conferences but ISSAC is a perfect test case. > > For background some of you need to know that Carlo Traverso has been trying > to develop an "Active Journal" which would accept "Literate Programs" for > publication. > > Literate programs (my definition) are papers that contain the complete, > runnable source code for the published algorithm as well as things like > proof of termination, order of the algorithm, etc. If these are published > in an Active Journal then people will be able to use the algorithms directly. > This has been a problem in the past (e.g. a new, faster Groebner basis > algorithm that does not have associated code). Given that we are doing > computational mathematics I claim that running code is as important as > a proof. Axiom has been rewritten to be all literate programs (that is, > all of the files are now documents and there is no lisp, boot, spac, C, or > Makefile files anymore). > > Another effort is the Doyen Computational Science Platform CD project > (http://sourceforge.net/projects/doyencd) > which has created a Live CD (that is, one that will boot linux on a > computer from the CD without changing your hard drive). The goal of > the Doyen project is to set up a Live CD that contains several computer > algebra systems, a web server, a browser, and a special Wiki, a website > user's can change. Thanks to Bill Page Axiom already has such a wiki > (http://page.axiom-developer.org) > > You should be able to "drag and drop" a literate program onto a Doyen > CD and have it automatically compile, install, latex, and set up to run > the program in the paper. Doyen is not quite there yet but that is the > goal. > > If we can create a working demonstration of a Doyen CD for the next > ISSAC then we can encourage people to write algorithms that will work > on the CD software and publish the resulting literate programs in > Carlo's Active Journal. > > All of this technology exists in prototype form. ISSAC would be the > perfect forum to demonstrate a working prototype and it would certainly > make the ISSAC CDs much more than just an electronic copy of a paper > journal. If this works then the ACM can spread the technology to the > other computational science areas. > > Comments? > > Tim Daly -- Emil Volcheck [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://acm.org/~volcheck _______________________________________________ Axiom-developer mailing list [email protected] http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/axiom-developer
