[Axiom-developer] RE: Polymake needs permission to write a file

[Martin Rubey]

Hi Bill,

lot of traffic today, eh?

Page, Bill writes:

 > When that is done that I will be able to give you an example
 > of sockets in Axiom.

OK.

 > > > BTW, I think there may be a problem with one of the constructors:
 > > >
 > > > $ /usr/local/polymake/bin/rand_sphere randsp.poly 2 3
 > > > Illegal instruction
 > > > $
 > > 
 > > Hm, on my machine here it works just fine... Except that I need to
 > > parametrize the domain, to allow for polytopes with vertices being
 > > floats or rational numbers.
 > 
 > I don't understand what you mean by "parameterize the domain". 

The polymake domain currently has

     vertices: % -> Matrix Integer

This cannot work, since the vertices are not always integers. See my other
post.


 > On your computer if you type:
 > 
 > rand_sphere randsp.poly 2 3
 > 
 > what are the contents of the randsp.poly file?

depends on the seed, obviously...

_application polytope
_version 2.1.0
_type RationalPolytope

AMBIENT_DIM
2

POINTS
1 -0.063018 -0.998012
1 0.840255 0.542191
1 -0.96204 -0.272908

BOUNDED
1


 > > I grepped my polymake directory for "Illegal instruction" but got no
 > > match. Where does this come from?
 > > 
 > 
 > This is an error message from the linux operating system indicating that the
 > program tried to execute an illegal machine instruction (i.e.  an
 > instruction that was not allowed by the CPU in the particular state that it
 > was in). This one of several different kinds of program aborts and is
 > usually caused by a programming error or perhaps a compiler error.

might it be that you got the wrong RPM? 

 > This problem might be solved if we could just re-compile the programs from
 > source code.

Yes. but the developers themselves say that this is at least very time
consuming, if you don't have enough memory on your machine. Well, I guess you
have...


Martin