Mathematica and BattleBots

hesheboy writes "Wolfram.com has a story about building a battlebot with Mathematica: 'October 28, 2002--Looking for action with brains-over-brawn appeal? William McHargue, a freelance physicist and long-time Mathematica user, is one of many who find this combination in BattleBots, the new fighting-robot craze. "With BattleBots, one can be aggressive and yet nobody gets hurt," says McHargue. Recently, McHargue was featured in Mechanical Engineering magazine for work on Tesla's Tornado, his BattleBot.'"

While reading

[jukal]

...remember that Wolfram.com [wolfram.com] the site on which the story resied == Mathematica. The company whose product [wolfram.com] Mathematica is. So, do not expect to see something unprejudiced. It's an interesting story anyway :)

Website

[Kj0n]

Found on Google [google.com]: the official website [mchargue.org].

Re:Any Free Alternative?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you want something like matlab that is open source (GPL) you can take a look at Octave (www.octave.org). Nothing symbolic in the basic design, but maybe some component that is symbolic and runs in octave? I hav'nt looked into that program that much.

Re:Any Free Alternative?

[krazyninja]

You can try Scilab from here [inria.fr]. It is a free scientific computation tool, feel-like-matlab clone.

Re:Any Free Alternative?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yacas [sourceforge.net] -- A symbolic computation engine similar to Mathematica or Maple. It has a Lisp core, with plenty of syntactic sugar. Released under the GPL.

Octave [octave.org] -- A damn fine piece of work for numerical computation. IMO, it beats MatLab any day. Released under the GPL.

Maxima [sourceforge.net] -- a descendant of Macsyma, which all True Math Geeks remember. It's a symbolic computation engine with a Lisp core, like Yacas. Released under the GPL.

JACAL [mit.edu] -- another symbolic computation engine with a Lisp core. Released under the GPL.

GAP [anu.edu.au] -- a system for doing abstract algebra and combinatorics. This is really only of interest to a limited subset of mathematicians. However, it is incredibly good at doing what it does. GAP is under its own license, which I'm fairly certain would classify as free to RMS.

There are many others, but these are the most mature that I've dealt with. If you're looking for a pretty front-end, Maxima has one, there's one for Octave called G-Octave [kstraight.net] (uses Gnome), and there's one for GAP called XGAP [anu.edu.au]. None of them match the purtiness of Mathematica or Maple, though. There is TeXmacs [texmacs.org], a rather impressive TeX-ish WYSIWYG. With some effort, you can make it serve as an input/output mechanism for any CAS. However, I recommend against using it for its intended purpose as, although its rendering is very impressive, it is a big step backwards for structured documents.