I had the pleasure of visiting Oxford while on vacation in England. I regret that I did not get a chance to visit the NAG headquarters there, but that thought gave me the idea for this next blog entry. The Optimization package for local optimization uses as its underlying engine the NAG E04 optimization suite. It is possible to use the Optimization package without knowing the internal workings of the commands. However, for those of you who are interested in such details, it is possible to get more information. If you set infolevel[Optimization] to 2 or higher, the names of the NAG routines (e.g. E04UCA) are displayed. It is useful to set the infolevel value in any case, as the messages provide valuable information about how the computation is proceeding. We've provided some general information about the methods used in the Optimization help pages (see Optimization/Methods, for example). For detailed information, including a description of the mathematics behind the algorithms, you can look at NAG's own documentation at its Web site: http://www.nag.co.uk/. A caveat: I don't recommend reading the documentation to debug a program, as Maple's error codes and such don't always correspond directly to NAG's. However, the overviews are useful if you are interested in understanding the basics of the algorithms. If you have access to the NAG library, you might also find the new Maple-NAG connector useful.

Please Wait...