{"id":81,"date":"2008-03-20T11:36:44","date_gmt":"2008-03-20T10:36:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.walkingrandomly.com\/?p=81"},"modified":"2008-03-20T11:36:44","modified_gmt":"2008-03-20T10:36:44","slug":"computer-algebra-systems-in-odd-places-1-the-nintendo-ds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/?p=81","title":{"rendered":"Computer Algebra Systems in odd places #1 – The Nintendo DS"},"content":{"rendered":"

Not too long ago it was necessary to buy some rather expensive hardware if you wanted access to a computer algebra system. The first time I used Mathematica (back in 2000), for example, it was installed on a Unix machine, shared between about 30 researchers, which cost around 8000 pounds! These days of course, it runs quite happily on a laptop costing just a few hundred pounds but now it’s even possible to get access to a computer algebra system on a hardware as cheap as a handheld games console!<\/p>\n

The computer algebra system in question is Mathomatic<\/a>, an open source application that has been in continuous development for over 20 years. It’s capable of acting as a calculator, solving and simplifying equations and doing calculus on polynomials among other things. Back in late 2006 it was ported<\/a> over to Nintendo’s DS console<\/a> – twice!. I haven’t had chance to try it out because I don’t own the hardware (story of my life) but I would love to hear from anyone who has played with it (or any other maths package for that matter) on one of these game consoles.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Nintendo’s machine is already being used in an educational setting (successfully it seems<\/a> although much larger trials need to be done I think) using Dr Kawashima’s More Brain Training<\/a> which apparently helps with skills such as mental arithmetic, memory and problem solving but I think this is just scratching the surface of what can be done with this kind of technology.<\/p>\n

What would be really amazing would be a port of Wolfram’s Mathplayer<\/a> to a device like this – then the Wolfram Demonstrations project would definitely come into its own. I imagine that the Nintendo DS (or the iPhone for that matter) doesn’t have enough computational power to successfully run something as complicated as Mathplayer but I think that affordable handheld devices that do<\/a> are just around the corner.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Not too long ago it was necessary to buy some rather expensive hardware if you wanted access to a computer algebra system. The first time I used Mathematica (back in 2000), for example, it was installed on a Unix machine, shared between about 30 researchers, which cost around 8000 pounds! These days of course, it […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-81","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-math-software"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3swhs-1j","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=81"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=81"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=81"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=81"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}