Re: [Maxima-discuss] Schoonship Form

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

Interesting article. It claims
"Its predecessor, a program called Schoonschip created by Martinus Veltman,
was released as a specialized chip that you plugged into the side of an
Atari computer"

Clearly false, but how to judge the rest of the article?
Veltman died in January, 2021.  His program had to overcome substantial
difficulties
inherent in the use of the CDC 64-bit architecture.  It (and to some
extent, FORM) illustrates how one can make programs run faster by leaving
out features that slow down the competition.   I never used the program
myself, but  my recollection is that
Veltman used floating-point numbers instead of rationals. Which works for a
while.
  Wolfram's SMP used the same idea, leading to embarrassing results.   Or
allowing only polynomials.. neglecting to simplify expressions with
denominators.
I assume that if the FORM fans choose the benchmarks, that FORM will be
really fast.
Many of the features essential to what people expect of Maxima (etc) are
going to be missing, so FORM could not really be compared there.

The thrust of the article -- that funding of  software "tools" is difficult
because
software is not recognized as "publications" -- is only partly true.

I expect that it is difficult to get "physics oriented" funding to build or
maintain specialized software tools in computational physics.    Replace
"physics" with any other discipline -- math, biology, ... still true.

More general "software tools" may attract funding somewhat more broadly in
the context of (say) "data science" or "scientific computing".
Though even there, publications may still be a more convenient way for
agencies to gauge success than (say) number of users who downloaded the
software.
117,000 downloads from sourceforge in the last 3 months would seem  like
some kind of endorsement of Maxima.
 On the other hand, publications have referee reports etc.

 Mere popularity  may even be downvalued these days. Think Twitter.

RJF





On Sat, Dec 3, 2022 at 12:34 PM Michel Talon <ta...@lp...> wrote:

> Hello,
>
> i have found the following article which may be of interest to some of you:
>
>
> https://www.quantamagazine.org/crucial-computer-program-for-particle-physics-at-risk-of-obsolescence-20221201/?mc_cid=27b6cad563
>
> Some statements are wrong, notably Schoonship was developed by Veltman in
> assembly language of the
>
> CDC7600, a beautiful computer who disappeared long ago. The machine words
> were quite long so Veltman used
>
> parts of words to store information. With this program he did computations
> of radiative corrections in the standard model
>
> which gave him access to the Nobel prize. When the CDC disappeared the
> program was rewritten by Vermaseren in fortran,
>
> and given the name of Form. Presently i suppose such extremely complicated
> computations are no more of
>
> pressing interest to physicists, explaining the disillusion apparent in
> the article. However saying that Mathematica is now
>
> the replacement is perhaps an overstatement. For sure Mathematica is used
> to draw the Feynman diagrams, but computing
>
> them is another story.
>
>
> --
> Michel Talon
>
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