On 8 December 2010 23:31, rjf <fate...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > On Dec 8, 10:45 am, kcrisman <kcris...@gmail.com> wrote: >> > And why should anyone care? Do you think that Wolfram Alpha will last >> > longer than Mathematica?
That's such a stupid question, I'm not going to answer it. >> I think the point was that not everyone who might want to do this >> would have access to Mma, but that (for now) they would all have >> access to W|A. Just to clarify - I don't really have a horse in this >> race. >> >> - kcrisman Yes, that is one advantage Wolfram Alpha currently has over Mathematica and Maple. *Currently* it is useful and freely available, but it's anyones guess if it will stay like that. (I say useful, but I very very rarely use it myself). However, if a calculation in Sage gives xyz as the result, and Wolfram Alpha (i.e. Mathematica) gives xyz too, then that's useful to record. Even if Wolfram Alpha is no longer available, the fact that something has been compared once is useful to know. The scientific literature shows that DDT has caused birth defects in humans. I doubt anyone will ever get ethical committee approval to subject more women to DDT to verify the result again. > Right, that would be the case where both Sage and Wolfram Alpha last > longer than the University of Washington, (or at least UW's > Mathematica license). A great idea: not only have the recipient of > Sage redundantly spend a CPU day or two recompiling everything, but > have each recipient send > a few thousand duplicative "tests" to Wolfram Alpha. I hope the > sarcasm is evident. Sarcasm I expect from you. I don't actually follow what you are saying, but I doubt it is very important. Licenses expiring is a real issue. Also, moving from one institution A to institution B, where A had a license for Mathematica but not Maple, and B has a license for Maple and not Mathematica. That's a real issue. It's also true that Mathematica and Maple will "live" longer than many bits of open-source maths software. Some parts of Sage are no longer maintained by their upstream developers and I think that will just happen more and more over time. There are bits in Sage which I think would be very difficult to "fix" if they "break". > On the testing front, you could test random polynomials for a very > long time and not find this bug > in Mathematica (and maybe something like it in Sage). > Expand[(x^(2^(2^29))+1)^2] > though that may be a problem only on 32-bit Mathematica systems. > VB's "bugs" tend not to be of the form "break glass with hammer", but > of the form > "multiply and divide by a complicated expression, with an integration > in the middle". > Oh, the complicated expression is actually zero, but you didn't > notice. I know some of VB's "bugs" are like that, but many are not. Some look like they could appear from a human wanting to solve a problem, rather than a computer testing. > Now VB can find a bug in nearly every non-trivial operation P. just > use P instead of "integration". > Is this useful? maybe. maybe not. > RJF Dave -- To post to this group, send an email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URL: http://www.sagemath.org
