On 2/13/07, Robert Dodier <robert.dodier at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> It seems within the realm of possiiblity to use a mix-n-match approach
> as shown by the moreforms function to attempt to automatically find
> a "good" equivalent expression (for various kinds of "good").
>
Yes, that's why I wrote it. I have played with it a bit. For small
expressions, it often does pretty well. For larger expressions, the problem
is that you often want to do term-wise or subset-of terms calculations (even
assuming there are no mixed terms). I have shared some code that looks at
all subsets on this list in the past. Of course, this blows up rather
quickly. And how do you go about finding
x^7+7*x^6+21*x^5+35*x^4+35*x^3+21*x^2+7*x => (x+1)^7-1 ?
In any case, yes, I agree, there is lots that can be done with exploration
of the simplification space -- much more sophisticated and more efficient
than the conceptual skeleton I posted.
-s