Subtropical Real Root Finding

We describe a new incomplete but terminating method for real root finding for large multivariate polynomials. We take an abstract view of the polynomial as the set of exponent vectors associated with sign information on the coefficients. Then we employ linear programming to heuristically find roots. There is a specialized variant for roots with exclusively positive coordinates, which is of considerable interest for applications in chemistry and systems biology. An implementation of our method combining the computer algebra system Reduce with the linear programming solver Gurobi has been successfully applied to input data originating from established mathematical models used in these areas. We have solved several hundred problems with up to more than 800000 monomials in up to 10 variables with degrees up to 12. Our method has failed due to its incompleteness in less than 8 percent of the cases

A Survey of Satisfiability Modulo Theory

Satisfiability modulo theory (SMT) consists in testing the satisfiability of first-order formulas over linear integer or real arithmetic, or other theories. In this survey, we explain the combination of propositional satisfiability and decision procedures for conjunctions known as DPLL(T), and the alternative "natural domain" approaches. We also cover quantifiers, Craig interpolants, polynomial arithmetic, and how SMT solvers are used in automated software analysis.Comment: Computer Algebra in Scientific Computing, Sep 2016, Bucharest, Romania. 201

Smaller SDP for SOS Decomposition

A popular numerical method to compute SOS (sum of squares of polynomials) decompositions for polynomials is to transform the problem into semi-definite programming (SDP) problems and then solve them by SDP solvers. In this paper, we focus on reducing the sizes of inputs to SDP solvers to improve the efficiency and reliability of those SDP based methods. Two types of polynomials, convex cover polynomials and split polynomials, are defined. A convex cover polynomial or a split polynomial can be decomposed into several smaller sub-polynomials such that the original polynomial is SOS if and only if the sub-polynomials are all SOS. Thus the original SOS problem can be decomposed equivalently into smaller sub-problems. It is proved that convex cover polynomials are split polynomials and it is quite possible that sparse polynomials with many variables are split polynomials, which can be efficiently detected in practice. Some necessary conditions for polynomials to be SOS are also given, which can help refute quickly those polynomials which have no SOS representations so that SDP solvers are not called in this case. All the new results lead to a new SDP based method to compute SOS decompositions, which improves this kind of methods by passing smaller inputs to SDP solvers in some cases. Experiments show that the number of monomials obtained by our program is often smaller than that by other SDP based software, especially for polynomials with many variables and high degrees. Numerical results on various tests are reported to show the performance of our program.Comment: 18 page