RIES

[Jason Grout]

Some of you may have seen the recent XKCD which presents various
odd-looking, but good, approximations for well-known numbers:

http://xkcd.com/1047/

One of the tools he used was RIES:

http://mrob.com/pub/ries/index.html

I'm curious: has anyone tried to make an optional spkg for RIES? It
looks like a pretty nifty, fun tool.

Jason

[mmarco]

This sounds pretty much like the identify command in maple:

http://www.maplesoft.com/support/help/Maple/view.aspx?path=identify


For me it looks like a fun tool, but there is some people that use it
seriously in their research.

[kcrisman]

I don't think so, but http://trac.sagemath.org/sage_trac/ticket/237 is
probably pretty closely related, given the following quote from the
RIES site:

Motivation and History
I wrote ries after I was frustrated by services such as Plouffe's
Inverter and the Inverse Symbolic Calculator. In case you're
wondering, the things that frustrated me are described here. I had
also been getting occasional emails from members of the Cult of 137,
and like-minded people claiming formulae for such things as the area
of the Mandelbrot set. I thought it would be nice to be able to
demonstrate how easy it is to find a formula for any number.
ries was first created for Linux1, but is is easily ported to Mac OS
X, and nearly any OS with a C compiler. It uses only the standard C
math and stdio libraries. The source code is distributed under GPL
2.0. You can also get the manpage source. If you don't already have a
copy, you should also retrieve the GNU General Public License version
2.0, which defines the terms under which this source code is made
available to you, here.

I think this would be a really great tool for Sage, because currently
it's something where Maple is obviously ahead of us. I'm excited that
there is an open-source version of this - any word on the rep it has
in that symbolics community? Also note that it is apparently
currently GPL 2, not GPL 2+.

- kcrisman

[Jason Grout]

The (single) source file says it is GPL 2+.

Jason

[kcrisman]

> > I think this would be a really great tool for Sage, because currently
> > it's something where Maple is obviously ahead of us.  I'm excited that
> > there is an open-source version of this - any word on the rep it has
> > in that symbolics community?  Also note that it is apparently
> > currently GPL 2, not GPL 2+.
>
> The (single) source file says it is GPL 2+.

Hmm, that's funny, you're right, but on the page it says

RIES Source Code (build instructions in header comment) License
(GPL 2.0)

so maybe he should clarify that. Anyway, minor point if it would be
optional spkg for now.

[Keshav Kini]

Jason Grout <jason...@creativetrax.com> writes:
> I'm curious: has anyone tried to make an optional spkg for RIES? It
> looks like a pretty nifty, fun tool.

I have now - http://boxen.math.washington.edu/home/keshav/files/ries-20120420.spkg

It just dumps the ries executable into $SAGE_LOCAL/bin - no Python
bindings included.

-Keshav

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