Users clamoring for improvement are among the sincerest form of flattery... I think Simon has already done a lot to address this: His offering of that 657 gigabytes(!) of raw data seems meant to encourage the development of third-party search tools. It seems for example, that one could parse the ASCII text expressions to tag all values, indexed by what functions they're made of, thus allowing custom weight functions to sort the expressions by relative value, according to the user's peculiar tastes. So, not the full source code solution, but definitely a thumping good start. Personally, I was happy when the online Inverse Symbolic Calculator started sorting their results by length of expression (try [1] for example). Tautologies are evident, but when you get 'em, the simplest one is first. My wishes for PI (as opposed to Log[-1]/I) are fairly simple: let's please list X separately from 10X and X/10. See [1] again and note that log(35027/27791) = 2.314069653887953... is listed right after exp(Pi) = 23.14069263277926... Is a factor of 10 really that insignificant? (-: - Robert [1] http://bootes.math.uqam.ca/cgi-bin/ipcgi/lookup.pl?Submit=GO+&number=23.1406... On Thu, Dec 29, 2011 at 14:52, <rcs@xmission.com> wrote:
More wish list:
Supply the Inverter as a program [...] Allow for some user control of the generation priorities. [...] Add a few more specific search algorithms: [...] Allow several numbers to be input, perhaps to find a relationship. [...]
[...] User control of the search priority is double edged: The upside is
that your personal knowledge of the number's origins is a big clue to what expressions might be relevant. (We don't need no stinkin' Bessel functions.) The downside is that you lose the benefit of a fresh point of view, since every number and special function is an input from the math community at large.
The tautology problem will become worse. [...]
[...] -- Robert Munafo -- mrob.com Follow me at: gplus.to/mrob - fb.com/mrob27 - twitter.com/mrob_27 - mrob27.wordpress.com - youtube.com/user/mrob143 - rilybot.blogspot.com