[Maxima-discuss] run of the mill... was Re: Cheating Around Maxima Latex

[Richard F. <fa...@cs...>]

Just a brief observation about what "run of the mill" might be.
Some years ago I had a project, Tilu, that hooked up a web page to an 
integral table
lookup program (a program much less comprehensive than Albert Rich's Rubi).
We kept track of what people tried to integrate using Tilu.  The vast 
majority
("run of the mill" perhaps) were variations of sin(x).  Like
sinx,   sin x ,   sin ax, sin[x].
So we changed our parser so that any of those forms were acceptable.

Consequently, a really weak system, but one bolstered to take erroneous
input, could answer a vast majority of the cases.  Like a CAS that can
do high-school algebra will do the vast majority of problems, because
they are from high-school students. Except the students will not
be able to type syntactically correct input, so there's THAT problem.
So we looked at stylus-based input; an interesting problem with
a number of partial solutions out there.
I recall that there is one system that promises to do your
homework problem -- all you have to do is send it a photograph
of the problem...
   So I generally think of success at "run of the mill" problem solving
  as a surprisingly low bar, algorithmically speaking.  This is not
terrible, just so different from ambitions of CASs.
RJF


On 10/26/2020 4:59 PM, Robert Dodier wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 26, 2020 at 3:57 PM Raymond Toy <toy...@gm...> wrote:
>
>> I agree. I want Maxima to produce the correct answers.  Then it's up to me to have the TeX form be in the format I want. For example, it's impossible for Maxima to know if I want \frac or \displayfrac.  Or what the order of the variables should be when I format it.
>>
>> I pretty much expect to have to do some editing of the TeX form to produce what I want.  And what I want may not be what you want.
> I dunno, this feels too pessimistic to me, the situation is really
> more rosy than that. Maxima can already do a decent job with the vast
> majority of run of the mill expressions, and something comprehensible
> otherwise, and if Maxima's tex output is really lacking in some way,
> by all means, let's fix it.
>
> Maxima's tex output is the basis for the stuff that's displayed (via
> MathJax I guess) by Jupyter, and it's more than workable. If I were
> going to publish a paper, sure, I might tweak the output, but for
> everyday stuff, Maxima's tex is quite sufficient.
>
> best,
>
> Robert Dodier