17 lines
919 B
Plaintext
17 lines
919 B
Plaintext
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The volume is one of the central properties of a convex body, and volume
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computation is involved in many hard problems. Applications range from rather
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classical ones as in convex optimisation to problems in remote fields like
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algebraic geometry where the number of common roots of polynomials can be
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related to a special polytope volume.
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Part of the fascination of the subject stems from the discrepancy between the
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intuitive notion of "volume" and the actual hardness of computing it. Despite
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this discouraging complexity - algorithms in general need exponential time in
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the input dimension - steadily growing computer power enables us to attack
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problems of practical interest.
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Vinci is an easy to install C package that implements several algorithms for
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volume computation. It is the fruit of a research project carried out at the
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end of the 1990s at the IFOR (Institute for Operations Research) of the ETH
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Zurich.
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