axima-bounces at math.utexas.edu wrote on 11/20/2006 12:28:40 PM:
> I believe that the commercial macsyma includes a program by Bill
> Gosper to determine the values of inequalities by a more principled
> method involving computing how many bits of precision are necessary
> to determine the sign of an algebraic expression (or the direction
> of an inequality)
> and then computing the result. At least when possible.
Although my method is sophomoric, I don't recall it ever giving
an answer that is just plain wrong (sometimes it returns a noun
form when it shouldn't, but not wrong). It's a shame that Bill Gosper's
code is effectively lost---I think that duplicating it would be a
great deal of work. If anybody would like to try, that would be
great. But I think other fixes (say fix sign for linear inequalities)
have a much higher priority.
Barton