GSoC with Flint – Week 2

I’ve just reached the end of the second week of Google summer of code so it’s about time for a short update.

As with last week I’ve been working on the project in between my exams (which finish on Tuesday!) so progress has been slow so far. This week I got a few bugs fixed with the classical implementation and test code before moving on to starting work on another algorithm for for finding the Hermite normal form based on the extended Euclidean algorithm. This is still a classical algorithm but it does improve the efficiency of the most basic approach. However it still suffers from the coefficient expansion problem that causes these algorithms to all end up taking more time than they might initially appear to, which is why more intricate methods are needed for algorithms that scale well.

I’m very much looking forward to getting started working on Flint full time this week and hopefully next week I’ll have some more interesting news to share here!