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Re: Comparison between Mathematica and other symbolic systems

  • To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
  • Subject: [mg92550] Re: Comparison between Mathematica and other symbolic systems
  • From: Bill Rowe <readnews at sbcglobal.net>
  • Date: Sat, 4 Oct 2008 06:17:47 -0400 (EDT)

On 10/3/08 at 6:41 AM, awnl at gmx-topmail.de (Albert Retey) wrote:

>When choosing a system, I think one needs to answer these questions:

>1) can the system solve the problem at hand
>2) how much effort is it to feed the problem to the system
>3) how efficient is the system in calculating the solution

>when the answer to question one is true for mathematica (which I
>think is true for all but some very special cases), I think it will
>outperform other systems considering question 2 in almost every case
>(assuming some familiarisation with its concepts). Considering
>question 3 the mileage may vary, but usually the skills of the
>person implementing the solution are much more important than the
>pure performance of the system...

Which really says 2) is the most important consideration. But I
would expand 2) to be the amount of time to input the problem
*and* verify the input has been done correctly. In my
experience, the time to verify/debug input is by far where most
of the effort is spent.


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