[GiNaC-devel] Breaking News

[Richard B. Kreckel]

                                             Erlangen, October 6, 2005
                                               (for immediate release)

The GiNaC/CLN hackers, the leading providers of advanced mathematical
software solutions for research and industrial applications, are proud
to announce that their system scored second in the "Many Digits"
Friendly Competition [0], held 3rd and 4th October at the Radboud
University in Nijmegen, The Netherlands.  Although Richard Kreckel,
former vice president of GiNaC's PR department has retired into
industry, he was available to compete against the world's finest exact
real arithmetic hackers.

"It was a thrilling experience" said Richard Kreckel at a meeting with
press.  "I basically started hacking on the competition problems
Monday morning and stopped only an hour before our turn at the
competition Tuesday afternoon.  Little sleep compensated only by beer,
coffee and lots of caffeinated peppermints.  It was quite similar to
those release parties at University."

Maybe it wasn't enough caffeine, though.  The winner at the
competition was the MPFR team headed by Paul Zimmermann.  Says Richard
Kreckel: "Well, they certainly cut some corners.  They discovered,
coded and tested closed-form solutions for hard iterative problems,
thus being better than anybody else by orders of magnitude.  Their
winning is well-deserved.  Congratulations!"  Other competing systems
were iRRAM, Wolfram's Mathematica, Maple, RealLib, COMP, Few Digits and
Bignum.

Although only provisional rankings have been published so far [1],
ground-shaking changes in the results are not expected.  The "Many
Digits" Friendly Competition was of purely numerical nature: none of
the 24 competition problems called for symbolic manipulations.  Hence,
it really was a measure of CLN's numerical power, rather than GiNaC's
symbolic flexibility.  Bruno Haible, the original author of the CLN
library could not be reached for a statement.  It is assumed that he
is busy hunting down bugs in several dozen GNU software packages at
the same time.  He has all the time.  After all, he has retired to
industry, too.


[0] <http://www.cs.ru.nl/~milad/manydigits/>
[1] <http://www.cs.ru.nl/~milad/manydigits/raw_provisional.html>