"Alasdair McAndrew" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 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... I believe many of his issues with Axioms are still unresolved. | And even then, his final test, which had over 500 | problems purporting to be from "all areas of mathematics" was not in any way | comprehensive: no topology, no abstract algebra, not much logic, nothing on | graphics, and so on. And these tests only tested the "breadth" of a system | - the number of different problems it could spit out a correct answer to. | In these tests, and in some smaller ones developed by Barry Simon, Axiom | performed very poorly. | | Nobody that I know of has attempted a more modern comparison, looking a | depth as much as breadth. Maybe because the task is not so trivial. I believe Wester did an excellent job. | It may well be that Axiom does not have the | black-box problem solving abilities of some of its rivals (put a problem in, | get an answer out), but it may be that in depth and in its fundamental | design paradigms, it outweighs others. Maybe. Most people drive a car for the service it provides. Many people use CASes for similar reasons. | Does anybody know of any research in this area? I started a while back | trying to get some material together to write a small article comparing | CAS's for teaching and learning, but never got very far with it (something | common to all my projects at the moment!) | | It seems to me that this would be a worthwhile effort. Yes, but it is not a simple task. 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. -- Gaby _______________________________________________ Axiom-developer mailing list [email protected] http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/axiom-developer
