[seqfan] Re: detective work related to "Floretions"

[Antti Karttunen]

First, a big hats-off to Robert Munafo for his "Rosetta stone work", this is
very laudable task.

Now, some of Joerg's criticism makes sense, although unfortunately, he
represents it in his typical caustic manner. E.g. using scribd.com is not
necessarily
a good idea, if you want to distribute your documents. At least it used to
crash
my old browser before I could read the embedded documents past the first
page.

But, this is clearly over-the-top:

 Joerg Arndt <arndt at jjj.de> wrote:
>
> Does the python script linked under
> "Symbolic Calculator in Python" on the page
>  http://fumba.eu/sitelayout/Floretion.html
> not rate as "code from hell" for you?
> Compared to this IOCCC appears to be
> a competition in clarity.
>
>
Note that Creighton didn't originally intend the code for public
consumption!
We all write quick-and-dirty code, especially when we don't expect the code
to take part in a public beauty contest.

But...
The idea of using integer indexing (instead of letters) for the sixteen
bases
of Floretion algebra, is probably a good idea.

Especially it would probably make the code in the SymbolicMultiplier
much more concise. One should select the correspondence between indices
and bases with some care. E.g., probably the neutral element (1) should have
index 0. And do I guess correctly, that i, j, k with < or > on the top at
the page
http://fumba.eu/sitelayout/Floretion.html
mean the non-neutral bases of those two Quaternion-algebras
embedded in Floretion-algebra, and those with <> on the top are their
various
products?
With proper allocation of indices 1-15 to these (think Gray Code, etc.) one
would probably get some very concise code.



Yours,

Antti Karttunen
who has his own mess in OEIS waiting to be cleaned and polished...
(I hope to do it by myself one day.)