> Hi,
>
> I use maxima to find formulas I want to use in software development.
> It is pretty common, that I can bring my formulas to sums of products
> of serveral variables. To keep calculation time at a minimum I want to
> minimize the actual count of operations. I found that the optimize()
> function attempts to do what I want. But it is not very successful
> i.e. an expression like a*b*c+b*c*d, that contains the product b*c
> twice can not be optimized. Is there a way to do this with maxima?
Well, if you just need to minimize the total number of operations,
then I think factor() is all you need. If you want to introduce some
metric (ie. + has cost 1, * has cost 2, power has cost 5) then this
can be done too but it is some work...
HTH,
Harald