Symbolic Manipulation Program, usually called SMP, was a

computer algebra system A computer algebra system (CAS) or symbolic algebra system (SAS) is any mathematical software with the ability to manipulate mathematical expressions in a way similar to the traditional manual computations of mathematicians and scientists. The de ...

Stephen Wolfram Stephen Wolfram (; born 29 August 1959) is a British-American computer scientist, physicist, and businessman. He is known for his work in computer science, mathematics, and theoretical physics. In 2012, he was named a fellow of the American Ma ...

Caltech The California Institute of Technology (branded as Caltech or CIT)The university itself only spells its short form as "Caltech"; the institution considers other spellings such a"Cal Tech" and "CalTech" incorrect. The institute is also occasional ...

circa 1979. It was initially developed in the Caltech physics department with contributions from

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, Jeffrey M. Greif, Eric D. Mjolsness, Larry J. Romans, Timothy Shaw, and Anthony E. Terrano. SMP was first sold commercially in 1981, by the Computer Mathematics Corporation of

Los Angeles Los Angeles ( ; es, Los Ángeles, link=no , ), often referred to by its initials L.A., is the largest city in the state of California and the second most populous city in the United States after New York City, as well as one of the world' ...

, which later became part of

Inference Corporation Inference Corporation specializes in "the development of artificial intelligence computer systems." History Los Angeles-based ''Inference'' was founded in 1979. In the 1990s they built a case-based computer program for Compaq Computer Corpora ...

. Inference further developed the program and marketed it commercially from 1983 to 1988, but it was not a commercial success, and Inference became pessimistic about the market for symbolic math programs, and so abandoned SMP to concentrate on

expert system In artificial intelligence, an expert system is a computer system emulating the decision-making ability of a human expert. Expert systems are designed to solve complex problems by reasoning through bodies of knowledge, represented mainly as if� ...

s. SMP was influenced by the earlier computer algebra systems

Macsyma Macsyma (; "Project MAC's SYmbolic MAnipulator") is one of the oldest general-purpose computer algebra systems still in wide use. It was originally developed from 1968 to 1982 at MIT's Project MAC. In 1982, Macsyma was licensed to Symbolics and ...

(of which Wolfram was a user) and

Schoonschip Schoonschip was one of the first computer algebra systems, developed in 1963 by Martinus J. G. Veltman, for use in particle physics. "Schoonschip" refers to the Dutch expression "schoon schip maken": to make a clean sweep, to clean/clear things u ...

(whose code Wolfram studied). SMP follows a rule-based approach, giving it a "consistent, pattern-directed language". Unlike Macsyma and Reduce, it was written in C. During the 1980s, it was one of the generally available general-purpose computer algebra systems, along with

Reduce Reduction, reduced, or reduce may refer to: Science and technology Chemistry * Reduction (chemistry), part of a reduction-oxidation (redox) reaction in which atoms have their oxidation state changed. ** Organic redox reaction, a redox react ...

, Macsyma, and Scratchpad, and later

muMATH muMATH is a computer algebra system (CAS), which was developed in the late 1970s and early eighties by Albert D. Rich and David Stoutemyer of Soft Warehouse in Honolulu, Hawaii. It was implemented in the muSIMP programming language which was buil ...

and

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. It was often used for teaching college calculus. The design of SMP's interactive language and its "map" commands influenced the design of the 1984 version of Scratchpad.

Criticism

SMP has been criticized for various characteristics, notably its use of

floating-point numbers In computing, floating-point arithmetic (FP) is arithmetic that represents real numbers approximately, using an integer with a fixed precision, called the significand, scaled by an integer exponent of a fixed base. For example, 12.345 can be ...

instead of exact rational numbers, which can lead to incorrect results, and makes polynomial greatest common divisor calculations problematic.Joel Moses, "Macsyma: A personal history", ''Journal of Symbolic Computation'' 47:123-130 (February 2012) , p. 129 Many other problems in early versions of the system were purportedly fixed in later versions.Richard J. Fateman, "Comments on SMP", ''ACM SIGSAM Bulletin'' 19:3:5-7 (August 1985)

References

Additional sources

* Chris A. Cole,

, "SMP: A Symbolic Manipulation Program", ''Proceedings of the fourth ACM symposium on Symbolic and algebraic computation'' (

SIGSAM SIGSAM is the ACM Special Interest Group on Symbolic and Algebraic Manipulation. It publishes the ''ACM Communications in Computer Algebra'' and often sponsors the ''International Symposium on Symbolic and Algebraic Computation'' (ISSAC). Externa ...

), Snowbird, Utah, 1981
full text
*

with Chris A. Cole, ''SMP: A Symbolic Manipulation Program, Reference Manual'', California Institute of Technology, 1981; Inference Corporation, 1983
full text
*

, "Symbolic Mathematical Computation", ''Communications of the ACM,'' April 1985 (Volume 28, Issue 4). Despite the general-sounding title the focus is on an introduction to SMP
Online version of this article
* J.M. Greif, "The SMP Pattern-Matcher" in B.F. Caviness (editor), Proceedings of EUROCAL 1985, volume 2, pgs. 303-314, Springer-Verlag Lecture Notes in Computer Science, no. 204, {{ISBN, 3-540-15984-3 A discussion, with examples, of the capabilities, tasks, and design philosophy of the pattern-matcher.
SMP's manual "SMP Handbook"

Stephen Wolfram's blog post on the history of SMP's creation
Computer algebra systems