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Re: Symbolic Computation



My naive guess (a model) is that the process is similar to OCR
(optical character recognition). Once an input is recognized a
predefined output is generated. For example, after recognizing
(a+b)^2 the output becomes a^2+2*a*b+b^2. If you enter (x+y)^2
it becomes (x^2+2*x*y+y^2), because a and b are generic.
Somebody anticipated a lot of generic inputs, like in a table of
integrals, and categorized them for speeding up searches. Yes,
a lookup table (database) of some kind.

Just a model to cover the ignorance. I would also like to know
how symbolic manipulations are performed in computers.

Bob Sciamanda wrote:

I am a big user of MathCad and am mystified by its powers of
symbolic computation - a subset of Maple. (Other software
packages also have this capability.)

How do they do this? I would like to have at least an overview
understanding of how this is done. Is it some clever
implementation of a lookup table algorithm? Can anyone
elaborate or point to a URL?