Weapon Liu wrote:
Thanks John, that's very informative. Although a little bit of code would be excellent :-)
See http://freespace.virgin.net/boost.regex/toolkit/html/math_toolkit/toolkit/ro...
I do have a question about the second application, I mean, don't you have to wait until runtime to know how many derivatives a function actually have? Or is it just that it can be known in the very scenario you mentioned?
The solvers are not intended to be "hands off", which is to say they're used when: I want to compute the inverse of a function numerically. I know how many derivatives I can compute (if any). I know where to start looking for the root, and which method performs the best. It might be possible to use these root finders as the underlying engine for a higher level API for use in situations where you know next to nothing about the problem domain. But you can get yourself into so much trouble if you start looking for the root in the wrong place, or just pick the wrong algorithm for the job, that I would rather users of that code are forced to think at least a little about the problem domain. John.