Like I said in my last post, this was my first week in college after summer vacation. I had to reschedule my daily work according to my class timings (which are pretty arbitrary). Anyway, since I do not have a test anytime soon, things were manageable.

So Far

Ring Series

This week I worked on rs_series in PR 9614. As Donald Knuth succinctly said, ‘Premature optimisation is the root of all evil’, my first goal was to write a function that used ring_series to expand Basic expressions and worked in all cases. That has been achieved. The new function is considerably faster than SymPy’s series in most cases. eg.

In [9]: %timeit rs_series(sin(a)*cos(a) - exp(a**2*b),a,10)
10 loops, best of 3: 46.7 ms per loop

In [10]: %timeit (sin(a)*cos(a) - exp(a**2*b)).series(a,0,10)
1 loops, best of 3: 1.08 s per loop

However, in many cases the speed advantage is not enough, especially considering that all elementary ring_series functions are faster than SymPy’s series functions by factors of 20-100. Consider:

In [20]: q
Out[20]: (exp(a*b) + sin(a))*(exp(a**2 + a) + sin(a))*(sin(a) + cos(a))

In [21]: %timeit q.series(a,0,10)
1 loops, best of 3: 2.81 s per loop

In [22]: %timeit rs_series(q,a,10)
1 loops, best of 3: 3.99 s per loop

In this case, rs_series is in fact slower than the current series method!. This means that rs_series needs to be optimised, as expanding the same expression directly with rs_* functions is much faster.

In [23]: %timeit (rs_exp(x*y,x,10) + rs_sin(x,x,10))*(rs_exp(x**2+ x,x,10) + rs_sin(x,x,10))*(rs_sin(x,x,10) + rs_cos(x,x,10))
1 loops, best of 3: 217 ms per loop

I spent Friday playing with rs_series. Since the function is recursive, I even tried using a functional approach (with map, reduce, partial, etc). It was fun exploring SymPy’s functional capabilities (which are quite decent, though Haskell’s syntax is of course more natural). This didn’t make much difference in speed. Code profiling revealed that rs_series is making too many function calls (which is expected). So, I plan to try a non-recursive approach to see if that makes much of a difference. Other than that, I will also try to make it smarter so that it does not go through needless iterations (which it currently does in many cases).

SymEngine

I had a discussion with Sumith about Polynomial wrappers. I am helping him with constructors and multiplication. We both want the basic Polynomial class done as soon as possible, so that I can start with writing series expansion of functions using it.

I also sent a PR 562 that adds C wrappers for Complex class. This will be especially helpful for Ruby wrappers that Abinash is working on. FQA is a nice place to read about writing C++/C wrappers and for some side entertainment too.

Other than that, I also happened to have a discussion with Harsh on the new solve-set he and Amit are working on. Their basic idea is that you always work with sets (input and output) and that the user can choose what domain he wants to work on. The latter idea is quite similar to what SymPy’s polys does. Needless to say, their approach is much more powerful that solvers’s. I will be working with them.

Next Week

Targets for the next week are as modest as they are crucial:

  • Play with rs_series to make it faster.

  • Finish Polynomial wrappers and start working on series expansion.

Cheers!