PHCpack -- a package for Polynomial Homotopy Continuation

This package provides an interface to the software PHCpack, a general-purpose polynomial system solver that uses homotopy continuation. The main method is a numerical blackbox solver, implemented for Laurent systems. The package also provides a fast mixed volume computation, the ability to filter solutions, extract real solutions, or track solution paths defined by a polynomial homotopy. For positive dimensional solution sets, we can compute a numerical irreducible decomposition.

The software PHCpack itself is available at http://www.math.uic.edu/~jan/download.html. This site provides source code and its executable version phc. To use the methods from this package, the user must have the executable program phc available, preferably in the execution path. The functions in this package call the phc executable, behind the scenes, with appropriate input options, and save intermediate output to temporary files. For convenience, the file names are displayed, and the commands that are invoked are documented under "Consequences" for each function.

Below is a simple example using the most popular function, the numerical blackbox solver.

i1 : R = CC[x,y,z]

o1 = R

o1 : PolynomialRing

i2 : system = {y-x^2,z-x^3,x+y+z-1}

         2         3
o2 = {- x  + y, - x  + z, x + y + z - 1}

o2 : List

i3 : solns = solveSystem(system)

o3 = {{-.771845-1.11514*ii, -.647799+1.72143*ii, 2.41964-.606291*ii},
     ------------------------------------------------------------------------
     {.543689, .295598, .160713}, {-.771845+1.11514*ii, -.647799-1.72143*ii,
     ------------------------------------------------------------------------
     2.41964+.606291*ii}}

o3 : List

i4 : numSolns = #solns

o4 = 3

i5 : solns/print
{-.771845-1.11514*ii, -.647799+1.72143*ii, 2.41964-.606291*ii}
{.543689, .295598, .160713}
{-.771845+1.11514*ii, -.647799-1.72143*ii, 2.41964+.606291*ii}

o5 = {, , }

o5 : List

We see that there are three solutions to the above system. Each solution is of type Point and contains diagnostic information about the quality of the solution.

i6 : oneSoln = solns_0

o6 = oneSoln

o6 : Point

i7 : peek oneSoln

o7 = Point{cache => CacheTable{...3...}                             
           Coordinates => {-.771845-1.11514*ii, -.647799+1.72143*ii,
     ------------------------------------------------------------------------
                        }
     2.41964-.606291*ii}

The value of LastT is the end value of the continuation parameter: if it equals 1, then the solver reached the end of the path properly.

1. If you are having trouble installing the package, check whether the path to your PHCpack executable was set correctly. You can check this by typing the following command:

options PHCpack

If it is wrong, you can update it by putting the absolute path into the init-PHCpack.m2 file, For example, if the executable phc is located in C:/cygwin/PHC, then the line inside the init-PHCpack.m2 file will look like this:

"path" => "C:/cygwin/PHC/" .

Alternately, the path could be set when loading the package using the following command:

loadPackage ("PHCpack", Configuration=>{"path"=>"C:/cygwin/PHC/","PHCexe"=>"./phc"})

2. If the package SimpleDoc is not found when installing PHCpack.m2, see questions and answers 6, 7, and 8 on the Macaulay2 web site.

3. The current version 1.8 of PHCpack.m2 was developed with version 1.9 of Macaulay2 and with version 2.4.17 of phc.

Authors

• Elizabeth Gross <[email protected]>
• Sonja Petrovic <[email protected]>
• Jan Verschelde <[email protected]>
• Contributing Author: Anton Leykin
• Contributing Author: Jeff Sommars
• Contributing Author: Taylor Brysiewicz
• Contributing Author: Corey Harris
• Contributing Author: Diego Cifuentes
• Contributing Author: Kaie Kubjas
• Contributing Author: Anna Seigal

Certification

Version 1.6 of this package was accepted for publication in volume 5 of The Journal of Software for Algebra and Geometry on 2013-07-11, in the article Interfacing with PHCpack. That version can be obtained from the journal or from the Macaulay2 source code repository.

Version

This documentation describes version 1.8 of PHCpack.

Source code

The source code from which this documentation is derived is in the file PHCpack.m2. The auxiliary files accompanying it are in the directory PHCpack/.

Exports