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David_A10-Marble
10-Marble
May 17, 2017
Question

Are these known bugs in the symbolic engine of Prime 4 and MC 15 M045?

  • May 17, 2017
  • 1 reply
  • 5615 views

I've been a long-time user of Mathcad (since before it was a Windows application -- I think it was version 2!) and long enjoyed the simplicity of it's interface.

PROBLEM 1 - Erroneous symbolic calculations (multiple examples)

I just bought MC Prime 4 and was testing some calculations in Prime 4 versus v15 and v13 and came across several disappointments -- errors in MC 15 and MC Prime 4 that MC 13 handles with aplomb. Perhaps I've made some mistakes, but I post this message for any helpful support understanding what's wrong from experienced folks who've been using the products regularly, hopefully to understand my mistakes, if I've made any.

Note that in EVERY symbolic calculation issue I outline below, I have no problem with the calculation in MC v13. All of these issues became apparent as I was reviewing the Applied Statistics extension pack for v13 and potentially converting some of the documents to Prime 4.

I've attached two documents to this post that detail the errors I've found, which so far are all with symbolic calculations.

Briefly, the errors are:

1) Errors in the symbolic calculation of the mean and standard deviation of the Poisson distribution. This error occurs in both MC 15 M045 and MC Prime 4.

2) Errors in the symbolic calculation of the mean and standard deviation of the Normal distribution. This error occurs in both MC 15 M045 and MC Prime 4.

3) Errors in the symbolic calculation of the mean and standard deviation of the Binomial distribution. This error occurs in both MC 15 M045 and MC Prime 4.

These oddities make me question the accuracy of the symbolic engine in both MC 15 and Prime 4, especially when I don't already know what the solution is.

PROBLEM 2 - Text formatting oddity? or misunderstood usage?

I've also noticed one other oddity. In preparing the Prime 4 document for posting, I found no way to highlight the text that precedes each example, say with blue text or a yellow highlight UNLESS the text was in a text block. Is there no way in Prime 4 to format text in a text box?

TIA

David

1 reply

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LucMeekes23-Emerald IV
23-Emerald IV
May 17, 2017

David,

There are two reasons you see differences:

1. Mathcad 14, 15 and all versions of Prime use MuPad as symbolic engine, where Mathcad up to and including version 13 used Maple.

Personally I think Maple is better, only occasionally do I come across examples where the MuPad symbolic engine outperforms Maple.

As for presentation, I like MuPads better than Maple's

2. Prime has a long way to go before it becomes a real match for Mathcad 15 (let alone Mathcad 11). Fortunately customers still get Mathcad 15 for free when they buy a license for Prime. I have not seen any good reason yet to throw capital in the Prime money pit.

Hope this helps.

Luc

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    David_A10-MarbleAuthor
    10-Marble
    May 17, 2017

    Thanks LucMeekes. What I gather is that Prime is not even as capable as MC 13. Boy do I regret buying Prime. I had MC 14 working fine and it is more capable than Prime is in every way that's important to me. The only issue was some graphics issues running on a 64-bit machine that they didn't resolve with MC14 patches.

    Thanks

    David

    M
    mvenich14-Alexandrite
    14-Alexandrite
    May 18, 2017

    Mathcad is great for design calculations and units handling (even Prime 4, I actually like this version)

    But PTC's focus is not on the symbolic engine. The version of MuPad in Prime 4 is "MuPAD OEM kernel, version 3.2.1 (Mathsoft Kernel) © 2005 by SciFace Software GmbH & Co. KG." Will this version of MuPad be updated? Given that MuPad is now owned by Mathworks, it's doubtful.

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