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0 pointskmill3y ago0 comments

Are you familiar with the different stages of research? This is "basic research" -- they found a new determinant formula and analyzed it. Others can pick up their work and continue, for example creating implementations and comparing their runtimes in practice. I think including a determinant implementation would be detrimental if it were not accompanied by this additional analysis, since people might use this implementation as the standard implementation, but very likely in practice there will be many implementation tricks to get it to work competitively.

They're certainly not above writing code. You seem to have missed the appendix, where they wrote some to prove that their bound on the tensor rank of 4x4 determinants over GF2 is exactly 12. https://gitlab.com/apgoucher/det4f2

Also, a formula is not an algorithm. You can oftentimes extract an algorithm from a formula, but the value of a formula in pure math is to be able to write something in a different way. Formulas reveal structure that (hopefully) can be exploited when solving other problems.

> People could even get down to running the code just to check that the formula actually works !

This is an interesting perspective, but you have to take into account that papers are written for some audience in mind -- this one is written for combinatorialists (hence the math.CO designation on the arXiv). It's not too hard of an exercise to plug this formula into Mathematica for this audience. But also, this audience would rather see a proof than computational evidence.

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ur-whale3y ago· 2 in thread

> Are you familiar with

Starting a sentence by "Are you familiar with" is a pretty clear cut indication that you _do_ live in an ivory tower.

kmillOP3y ago

Sure, I'm a mathematician, but what point are you making beyond a potential ad hominem?

I myself include code in my own papers when it's useful. As the author of this paper mentioned (and it's something I'm a bit embarassed I missed), the asymptotics of this new algorithm do not compete with the usual O(n^3) algorithm, so it's not clear to me that having Python code would benefit anyone. Of course you never know, though I think the underlying concepts in their formula are significantly more difficult to learn than the notation itself, so the code also wouldn't help very much with understanding the formula.

Anyway, given that you're saying I'm in an ivory tower, doesn't that give me some authority to explain why the choice to not include code has nothing to do with it being an "insult" to the community or it "spoiling" the paper with "disgustingly usable code"?

ur-whale3y ago

> what point are you making beyond a potential ad hominem?

I guess I'm guilty of the exact same sin most math authors commit: I naively assumed that the readers of my post have the intellectual means to get to the obvious conclusion without crutches.

> so it's not clear to me that having Python code would benefit anyone

Please read my answer (and thanks) to the author where he addresses my complaint and does indeed publish the code (top of thread).

TL;DR: there are many (I'd wager most) people who vastly prefer reading code to reading obtuse abstract math papers written using specialized math jargon.

There is huge value in publishing your findings as code:

    . it can be *understood* by people who happen not to live in your ivory tower and might neither be able to parse the language, the symbols, the "what is considered trivial by the author and not worth mentioning in the paper". Code is clear, unambiguous, down to earth and leaves no stone unturned.

    . code can be *verified* by a machine, which goes a long way to prove that your entire paper isn't a giant pile of BS.

You jumped to conclusions that the code wasn't worth publishing because it isn't practical/efficient etc... You entirely missed the point. Code explains ideas clearly. Math papers very rarely do.

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